Jimmy Get Your Gun
Only in America would the nation’s highest court agonize over awarding the right to bear arms to the same citizens that it has denied any voice in the US Congress. Don’t misunderstand. The Nose believes in everyone’s right to bare arms or any other body part. He himself has often considered purchasing a handgun to deal with the roaches in his kitchen that often carry off his last slice of cold pizza in the wee hours of the morning.

Here are The Nose’s top 10 uses for handguns in the District:

1. Eliminating red light cameras.
2. Reducing the rat population.
3. Cutting off Dorothy Brazil.
4. Attracting the attention of law enforcement.
5. Terminating obnoxious cell phone usage.
6. Hailing a cab in Southeast.
7. Protecting residential parking.
8. Ensuring dog poop removal.
9. Expediting one’s dinner order.
10. Directing lost tourists and ballpark fans.

No doubt the highest number of applications for handguns will occur in Ward 1, where the city’s yuppie condo residents are confronting a spate of petty crime and muggings. Perhaps, Jim Graham can provide leadership by buying a gun himself.

Not that this is a likely scenario, given Graham’s long support of handgun control. The Nose, however, suspects that his motives are strictly personal in this regard. In the spirit of the famous Broadway tune:

A man's love is mighty
He'll even buy a nightie
For a guy who he thinks is fun.
But they don't buy pajamas
For Pistol packin' papas,
And you can't get a hug
From a mug with a slug,
Oh you can't get a man with a gun.

Cheer up, Jim. You will soon be able to use an old line in Dupont Circle bars: “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

A Coffee House that Belonged to All of Us
In ancient times when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the Washington Post publicly disparaged Capitol Hill as going “To Hill in a Handbasket,” two African-American entrepreneurs, Carla and Estelle, installed a roaster in the window of a small shop on Seventh Street SE and established the first coffee house in the neighborhood. Yes, Virginia, there was coffee before Starbucks.

For years, every morning one could smell the earthly scent of the beans wafting down the street from Roasters on the Hill. The café became a neighborhood institution. Book clubs met on its premises. Lovers held trysts. In the pre-wireless age before every other patron was huddled over a laptop, one could always make a friend while sitting outside of “Roasters” enjoying the spring day, a cup of joe and a delicious bagel.

Eventually, the original owners sold to Laurie, who owned the neighboring Ben & Jerry’s. The roaster was removed to the delight of the office workers housed upstairs. The café received a needed facelift and was reborn as Stompin Grounds. As part of the redesign, Laurie invited an artist she knew from Vermont, who created a wonderful wall fresco depicting the life around Eastern Market at the turn of the century. Many watched this talented women painstakingly create what became a neighborhood landmark while sipping their espresso. Stompin Grounds, in the tradition of Ben & Jerry’s, forged strong ties with the community engaging in a tremendous amount of charitable activities.

Eventually, Laurie moved on in her life and sold the business to Nick, an entrepreneur from the Virginia suburbs who christened the place Murky Coffee. Patrons quickly noticed the departure of the bagels. Later, some of the well-beloved, long-time staff left. Otherwise, not much changed, not even the signage outside, with one interesting exception: the establishment stopped taking credit cards.

Eventually, after a rumored run-in with the city health department, Nick remodeled the café desecrating the mural with rollers of white paint. Starbucks arrived on Eighth Street followed by Dunkin Donuts. Still, many patronized Murky Coffee as a community institution despite the surly pseudo hipster staff, cramped quarters and poor food offerings.

Suddenly it seemed, it all ended with the seizure of Murky Coffee by the DC tax authorities. Nick, it turns out, had not been very diligent about paying his sales tax. Crowds of frustrated, caffeine-deprived patrons gathered outside the café incredulously reading the notice posted on the door by the taxman and Nick’s handwritten response.

Nick never understood that he did not own the coffee shop; it belonged to Capitol Hill. Now, this community institution is in ruins due to the machinations of an incompetent at best, rapacious at worst, businessman.

A Capitol Failure
Since 9/11, the Capitol Police have turned the “People’s House” into an armed camp, erecting barricades, stationing police cars at all approaches, permanently closing streets, staging random traffic stops and erecting street surveillance cameras, all in the name of “security,” all at a tremendous cost. Their new Capitol resembles the Green Zone in Baghdad more than an icon of democracy.

After all of this investment in Capitol security, when its guardians finally discovered a suspected truck bomb, they chose to wait weeks before fully searching the seized vehicle preferring to park it next to a government building in the center of the District of Columbia. A more effective security precaution would have been to take a page out of the series “The Wire,” and have the police reverse all the street signs surrounding the Capitol to misdirect potential bombers. Perhaps, they could even be redesigned by DDOT with small motors to allow them to be remotely controlled from the Capitol Police’s high-tech command center?

Absurd? Perhaps. But, The Nose would rather live courageously under the threat of terror, if he could still take a stroll up to the Capitol’s western portico and gaze on the sun setting behind the Washington Monument.

Have a tip for The Nose, e-mail your tidbit to thenose@hillrag.com.