Weekend Roundup: Wait for iiiiiit...

First, an addendum to the last post about silly neighborhood signs. By taking only a slightly different walk last night I realized I missed THIS:

Literally a foot doctor.

(toe)Nailed it! What a way to end the week! AnkleNFoot Center, give me a call on my 24 hour phone service. I can redesign that poster for you.

And now for some international dangers...

On Pets and Other Patriotic Things.

America...fuck yeah!

Happy July 5th everyone! Ugh. OK, can we just agree that this is routinely the most anticlimactic day of the year to be an American? On July 4th you're gorging on flag cake and grilled meats, exploding things, putting the finishing touches on your tan, and misting up at John Phillips Sousa marches (just me?). Maybe you're doing all those things at once while watching a parade. On July 5th you're stuck face to wattle with the other glum Metra commuters. And there is no cake anywhere. Wha wha.

My fellow blogger put me to shame this year with his uberpatriotic D.C. celebration spot. Double fireworks all the way...so intense! I'll admit to jealousy, but I did have a pretty good consolation prize. I got to spend a long weekend with my favorite house pet*: Okie.

Okie is my landlady's rotund and hirsute golden retriever. Golden retrievers are the most American pet you can have. True statement. Okie's a total lover, but now that warm weather is finally here to stay, he's taken up residence in the flowerbed outside my windows. Given that my apartment is ground level this now means I am greeted by a furry, panting face whenever I exit the bedroom. 

Having a house pet is great. I essentially get to play the fun aunt who swoops in to give rubs and feed treats, but then leaves before any actual work (poop scooping) happens. And Okie is an ideal "nephew" because he is fairly lazy and undemanding. In any event, he's loads better than the other members of the natural kingdom lurking around my nest. House centipedes...totally not patriotic, probably Commies.

So, the Independence Day fun is over for this year, but that doesn't mean we can't all plan next year's extravaganza. I'm thinking... parade of puppies on the National Mall, with sunbathing Marines handing out burgers while we all sing, "God Bless America".

* This is not to be confused with my favorite pet, period. He knows who he is.

Old Movie, New Review: 2012 (Get Your Rapture On).

Actually, I wasn't warned.

If you've dropped by this blog before, you know my affinity for end of days movies. And you know that I have my survival plan in place for the Apocalypse. Right now, I'm feeling pret-ty smug about thinking ahead, because apparently The Rapture is coming TOMORROW. Yikes!

With my blueprint set, I've had time to get into the spirit of things and catch up on my disaster flicks. After lingering in my Netflix queue for, hmmm, about a year, 2012 finally had its day. Watching it probably was the best way to convince me of the impending Rapture, because for the first time ever I fast-fowarded through an Apocalypse movie. OK, and this film had L.A. actually tilt Titanic-style and slide into the Pacific, so where did it go so hilariously wrong? Let's break it down!

Unnecessary List: D.C. Edition

Here's mine. 

City Life Shout Out of the Year: Here’s a shout out to taxicabs: thanks for saving me a lot of money this year. Whether you maliciously ignored me, refused to accept a debit card, or just weren’t around when I needed you, you did what it took to protect my pocketbook and get me some much-needed exercise.

"It's Kabletown...with a 'K'"

Is that Ikea? Very nice. 

Cable TV is both ubiquitous and, if you don't count TLC, innocuous. That is, of course, until you live alone in a partially submerged cave that has never been fitted for cable lines and is protected by historical building regulations that disallow satellite dishes.  Being locked out of the system is like not having a brain hole to plug into the Matrix with.  What are you supposed to do? 

He Who Rules the Mob

Morning, readers! I am pleased to report that all City Dangers bloggers survived The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in D.C. this past weekend. Despite the estimated 200,000-strong crowd, and the huge potential for disaster, the day was a certified success... filled with sunshine, media-skewering jokes, and naturally, Ozzy Osbourne & Cat Stevens performing a duet.

A moderate and sane bottleneck.

While the politeness of the masses was appreciated at the time, it created a gaping void of topics for a new blog post. I was so sure we'd have a brilliant lesson in danger come out of the day, but in the end we were only moderately inconvenienced by a bottleneck upon exiting. Even then we had hilarious signs to entertain us. I'll leave it to my fellow blogger to hone in on any other slight Rally dangers.

But to take a cue from Stephen Colbert's fear theme, good-humored masses could VERY easily turn into an unruly mob at any moment. In fact, I encountered a much more dangerous group scenario at Reagan National Airport on my way home to Chicago.

"This is NOT civilization!"

Well, it's been a while since anyone posted on this blog. Perhaps you thought City Dangers was defunct, but I'd like to thank our loyal followers. Hi, Dad! Oh ... he left too? Awkward.

New business. I wait in line, then sell my front-row spot to the highest bid.

It turns out that a sizable city danger is the trap wherein you spend much of your free time working to support your urban lifestyle. A lifestyle you then cannot enjoy because your brain is Jell-o from squinting at Photoshop for 11 hours. Or, you know, solving world hunger. However you might be employed.

This Halloween, my reward for those long hours is a break from Chicago to visit an exotic and uniquely scary place: our nation's capital. Ostensibly, I am headed there to have sib bonding time and to reunionize with much-missed friends. But, there is also the matter of the small get-together on the National Mall called the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

"According to WMATA, this escalator is operational."

Stay to the right, guys.

The metro in DC is great - it's often orderly, on time, and clean-ish. (Of course, when something goes wrong, i.e. some anxious tourist or exhausted bureaucrat prevents the door from closing, the place makes the capsized Poseidon look like a poorly-done carnival ride.) One thing that's not great about Metro, though, is the escalators - they are so frequently incapacitated that, yes, they constitute a City Danger.

The escalator at the station near my office has been "closed for modernization" for months (I am expecting cup holders, charger outlets for my iPod, and leather) which annoyingly requires that traffic go both ways up the functioning escalator.