Dan Cook has a heart-to-heart with Islands frontman (and former member of the now-defunct Unicorns) Nick Thorburn, over on the main site.

The Northwest Current has always been one of the city’s most self-indulgent publications. Some of that self-love fell on our faces this week when Current writer and Georgetown grad school alum Krysten Jenci wrote a column about the Georgetown campus.

I can’t link to it because the Current doesn’t believe in the Internet, but I’ve retyped a representative excerpt:

I still remember standing on campus that first night filled with the kind of excitement that made me think I could change the world. Walking farther onto the campus, across the diagonal brick walkway toward the White-Gravenor building, I dreamed of learning great things and meeting important people.

I like Georgetown as much as the next nostalgic senior, but seriously? Get it together, Krysten.

She’s a “fitness professional”; he’s looking for someone athletic. They’re both disheartened by the fact that as 30-somethings, everyone they want to date is taken. Best of all, they both have ridiculous favorite foods. (Mandarin oranges and California Pizza Kitchen; ice cream and lemonade.) Give the DL matchmakers credit for picking a pair that looks promising, if not interesting.

When it comes to the actual date, though, she’s totally overthinking it. She’s pissed when he doesn’t give her props for her outfit (”Normally when I wear that dress, men compliment me”), and one of her post-date quotes is, “I really wish I really liked him.” Nevertheless, they find common ground in their past failed romances, so at least they’ve got something to talk about.

Her tendency to overthink shines through again in her 3.9 rating–any gradation smaller than .5 is getting ridiculous. It’s a date, not nuclear fusion. She follows it up with the typical “This guy is great, but you can’t make that spark happen.” He gives the night a slightly more generous and significantly more normal 4.5, and keeps things positive by calling her “a wonderful girl.”

Rating: 2. There’s really nothing to read in these interviews; it’s all just weird overanalysis on her part and benign platitudes on his.

Chance of Success: 2. The weirdest part of this week’s match up is the total 180 the girl pulls in the post-date update from the DL crew: “A couple days later, Carolyn called Date Lab to say: ‘The more I think about it, the more great I think Van is…I’m definitely going to try to date him. Cross your fingers for us.’”

If she’s that upfront about her self-deception and lack of genuine emotion, he’s going to pick up on it and these two are going nowhere.

It’s easy to find high-end chain retail in Georgetown, but we’re desperately lacking in the hand-decorated moleskin journal/reconstructed t-shirt/jewelry made from recycled balloons departments. Luckily, we have Crafty Bastards.

Between 10 and 5 today at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, indie crafters will showcase their wares at the annual festival, either making you kick yourself for not thinking of turning old library books into purses first, or wonder why a designer felt it necessary to create a fetus-shaped cookie cutter. There’ll be a lot of Etsy staples like knitted cupcakes and printed t-shirts, but also unique items like “The Prick Cushion” (an anatomically-correct pin cushion), oil portraits of the cast of The Office, and elaborately crafted shadow puppet toys.

City Paper sponsors Crafty Bastards, and it’s tough to get past their judging panel for a spot at the fair. Along with the deserving vendors, Bastards also features music, food, a craft supply swap, and a ton of workshops on printmaking, crocheting, and more. Because of the fair’s success in the its first four years, there will be two this year (the second one coming along in September), but all items are one-of-a-kind and probably won’t make a repeat appearance.

The Pyramid Atlantic Art Center is located at 8230 Georgia Avenue (Silver Spring Metro on the Red Line.)

-Sara Carothers, Voices Editor

Losing your GOCard sucks. You can’t get into your dorm, the library, Leo’s, or anywhere else on campus that matters. Non-college student D.C. residents will soon get the same feeling when the One Card–a new centralized identification system which will be their library card, public school attendance sheet, rec center pass, and more –spreads its mark of the Beast all over the District.

At first I was a little freaked out by the 1984-ishness of the new card, but then I remembered how excited I got when I found out that the new GOCards come with SmartTrip.

Plus, the ACLU gives it the thumbs up, and as people better at spotting threats to civil liberties than me, I’ll believe them when they say the One Card doesn’t infringe on privacy. Hopefully the city will ignore Georgetown’s lesson and not charge $25 for a replacement.

Who’d have thought that the Dupont Circle Metro stop was not only Georgetown students’ closest transportation hub, but a house of ill repute? Undercover police officers arrested a station manager and a custodian for “arranging sexual encounters from inside the station” (insert “ride it” joke).

The sexiest public transit crime in recent history went down when station manager Sharon Walters offered to arrange meetings with prostitutes for an undercover cop. And by prostitutes, she meant a station janitor.

Police set up the sting after seeing Walters’s name on a flyer for sex trips to Brazil. Who brings someone to Brazil to have sex? I thought that one of Brazil’s selling points was that the sex was freely available there.

So, the overpriced Robin Williams show and the new mascot were both a little lame. Still, something tells me our friends over in Foggy Bottom will be all right–GW is switching its student email service to Gmail in the fall.

The change comes with benefits: larger storage capacity, liberated server space, and University savings. If only Georgetown could have those things, too–but we can! Hopefully a successful switch to Gmail at GW will encourage our own administrators to follow suit.

DL scores a minor league success with this week’s match-up, which is a much better result than our daters’ questionnaires suggested.

In the questionnaire, he manages to come across as cocky and prudish at the same time–when asked to describe his dating life as a TV show, he says that he’s “gone on many dates with boring, stupid girls whom I’ve hated.” As for “ways he’s DC,” he says that he’s “conservative (no fooling around on first dates).” How is that DC? Unless his DC is DamasCus, obviously.

The girl, on the other hand, says that her TV series would play out like Carrie and Big on Sex and the City - and everyone knows you can’t trust a girl who thinks she’s a Carrie.

But apparently the DL team knows something I don’t, because this date seems to have worked out pretty well. It doesn’t hurt that the daters both think the other person is hot (”I wasn’t expecting someone so handsome,” “She was really pretty”), and the attraction coupled with an evening’s worth of sarcastic banter is enough to carry over to post-dinner drinks and and her inviting him to a party the next weekend.

Both daters rate the night a 5, which is a serious rarity. At 23 and 24, though, these two are clearly recent grads, and maybe they’re just used to rampant grade inflation.

Rating: 4. A date that works out is always a solid read, but these interviews were pretty heavy on the adjectives and light on the anecdotes. 0.5 docked for the lack of stories and another 0.5 docked for how fast their negging wears thin.

Chances of Success: 3. She’s clearly more into it than he is ( she describes him as “really awesome and cool, and really hot and a nice guy”), and he skips the party she invited him to.

Still, his suggestion that they hang out again sounded sincere, so I think there’s a chance this could turn into something more.

Flickr photo from user Stacina used under a Creative Commons license

The new Wolf Parade album, At Mount Zoomer, isn’t as good as 2005’s Apologies to the Queen Mary. It’s better. Dan Cook tells you why, over on the main site.

Do Red Line delays make you foam at the mouth? Have you ever mocked a tourist to his or her face? Do you religiously read a particular Post columnist solely to make fun of him or her?

If so, Why I Hate DC is holding an essay contest to find someone to take over blogging duties that’s perfect for you. Although I’ve often claimed to be a better hater than Amelie Gillette, I love this nitty gritty capital city much too much to apply. It’s all yours.