This belated edition of District Digest (courtesy of crashed computer) includes a new kind of flash mob, foul play, more Council member corruptions, a bad birthday, and a terrible restaurant experience.

Flash mobs of crime

On Saturday, Mayor Vincent Gray announced that the District would crack down on flash mob robberies.  Thursday morning, about ten girls invaded a Benning Road convenience store and stole about $70 of snacks and other items.

To combat similar instances, Montgomery County Council proposed a new curfew requiring children under 18 to be home by 11 p.m. on weeknights and 12 a.m. on weekends.

Foul play in the village

Last Tuesday, police arrested Albrecht Gero Muth, 47, for murdering his wife Viola Drath, 91, a former journalist and Georgetown socialite.

Drath was found unconscious in her Q Street home after purportedly falling down the stairs. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Drath had taken out several protective orders against Muth before the incident.

Read the rest of this entry »

He never sleeps…

Irony and flash mobs collided in an unfortunate way two few weeks ago at the Jefferson Memorial when a small group of twenty-something libertarians decided to commemorate Jefferson’s 265th birthday. They celebrated the agrarian republic-lover by dancing silently (each equipped with their own iPhones or iPods) at his memorial at midnight on April 13.

The geekphoria was dashed when one of the faithful was told she couldn’t dance there, and then arrested for asking why not. One guy had a video camera and caught the whole process on tape–it’s troublesome, and not just because libertarians can’t dance.

In the video, no one is being disrespectful or disorderly. The monuments are open 24/7, and the libertarians planned to come out at night so as not to disrupt tourists yelling on their cell phones or rowdy school groups. As the officer leads the arrested woman out of the rotunda, the videographer asks him to “Read these walls, I mean, you’re the security guard for this memorial. Thomas Jefferson is looking down and he is very dissatisfied. This is not the America he wanted.”

Satisfying Thomas Jefferson’s whims, projected through an unflinching stone gaze, must be difficult. But while it’s troubling that the officers arrested someone for peacefully and quietly celebrating, it’ll be worse if they don’t withdraw the charges in court this Tuesday. Maybe the guard misunderstood what kinds of activities people could do at the monuments (which are technically public property), but they should be able to admit their mistake and not prosecute her further. There’s no reason why Washingtonians should be afraid to have gatherings/protests/birthday parties of any peaceful kind on monument ground when it’s well within their rights.

-Sara Carothers, Voices editor. Photo from Flickr user Subtleness.

There may not have been 967 attendees, like Facebook had promised me, but no small number of people showed up today in Dupont Circle to take part in D.C.’s Pillow Fight 2008 (part of World Pillow Fight Day). That is, if you include not just those participating in the pillow fight, but also those just there to watch and the countless people there to document it with their video recorders and slick SLR cameras. (I, regrettably, am forced to count myself among this last group.)

When I arrived in Dupont Circle just after 2 p.m., people were milling about in clusters, awkwardly clutching their pillows. One of the organizers blew a whistle and the 50 or so people who had come to rumble gradually formed a mob on the northeast side of the circle, squinting their eyes and slamming away at each other. The participants ranged from young high schoolers to college students to self-consciously hip 20-somethings.

Some of the comments I heard from these hipsters regarding how uncool yet cool they were to be fighting with high schoolers: “I hope college is going to be this fun! We should organize it a pillow fight in college too! We could have it on the quad!” and “Is it illegal to hit a seventeen year-old girl with a pillow? I’ll ask Bill—he’s a lawyer.”

It wasn’t all fun and games, mind you. World Pillow Fight Day, part of the “urban playground movement,” according to their website, has loftier ambitions than that.

One of our goals is to make these unique happenings in public space become a significant part of popular culture, partially replacing passive, non-social, branded consumption experiences like watching television, and consciously rejecting the blight on our cities caused by the endless creep of advertising into public space.

So it’s hip and socially conscious! Looks like the only ones losing out were the birds who donated all that lovely down.