Drift Reality

Let me preface this by saying I have never really been inside Josephine’s. It might be a good place - but unfortunately I wouldn’t really know.

Last night I decided to check out this new club down at the intersection of K and Vermont, accompanied by two beautiful women: my sister and my girlfriend.

I walked up to the door after valeting my sister’s car and was confronted by a smallish fellow.

“So we are here as part of a friend’s group,” I mentioned.

After mulling over his list he looked up and with an inflated sense of self-importance responded, “Oh, she already came with several of her friends. There are too many of you and we are already at maximum capacity.”

As my companion began texting wildly in an effort to contact one of the club’s managers I asked, “Can I talk with your manager, please?” I asked.

“Well, the owner is over there,” he responded, pointing to some big guy with a goatee who took the clipboard and responded in a matter-of-fact tone, “If you’re not on the list you’re not getting in.”

At that point I simply shook my head in amazement and decided it was time to go.

Now, it is not necessarily the fact that I didn’t get in which made me so irritated, it was the false sense of importance that the people working the door at Josephine’s had, which bothered me.

I love the DC nightlife but exclusivity should be something that is attained over time - not something imposed from the outset.

Sure, there are places with lines that may be difficult to get in - but normally that is because a brand has been built up over time and has a core of loyal patrons who keep coming back.

It just seemed sort of strange that a club had suddenly popped up on Vermont and become ‘exclusive.’

At any rate, we decided to head up to the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown and sat on the couches by the fire place while enjoying a glass of wine and laughed about the experience.

Yesterday evening I was down in Ashburn visiting some friends when we decided to search for a good place to eat before heading to watch I am Legend.

Ashburn is not really known for its cuisine. Actually, it is not really known for very much besides being home to Redskins Park and having a high foreclosure rate so it is not really a destination that people go unless they know someone who lives there (which is the case with me).

However, its high per capita income and older demographic have fueled the development of a handful of good restaurants and Bangrak Thai Cuisine is one of them.

Bangrak has a great ambiance, amazing service, and top-notch food. I tried the Tod Mun, which was very tasty and followed that up with a delicious plate of Kao Pad Kaprow.

One of my friends ordered one of the dinner specials, a stew consisting of jumbo prawns, scallops and squid (I can’t recall the name) and asked that they hold the squid. They ended up bringing the dish out with the squid and the manager (also one of the proprietors of the place) came out, apologized, and then had a replacement sent out despite our assurances that the dish was fine.

At any rate, should you find yourself down in Ashburn looking for a great place to enjoy Thai cuisine, Bangrak Thai Cuisine should fit the bill.

My sister’s birthday was a couple weeks back and I decided to be a good big brother by taking her to one of the top salons in Washington, DC - Salon Bleu in Tysons Galleria. A close friend who I trust immensely recommended Anne, their senior creative stylist. It was a bit expensive but my sister proclaimed it was the best cut she had ever received in her life. Over the next few days she continued to mention how great her hair looked and how many compliments she had received so I figured it was worthwhile sharing.

Washington Post has an editorial review of Salon Bleu along with some pretty compelling reader feedback. The Salon also has a Web site you can visit for more information.

This past weekend I decided to take the initiative and seek out a new restaurant in DC.

After a bit of digging, I struck upon Rock Creek Restaurant in Bethesda, MD (incidentally, why is it that every restaurant’s Web site either looks like it was built by a college student in 1996 or tries to be uber-hip with ridiculous amounts of flash and a lounge soundtrack).

I haven’t been to the gym in about a month (since I dislocated my shoulder), I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to eat healthier.  At any rate, what appealed to be about the place was their emphasis on “delicious meals with nutritionally balanced ingredients.”

So I made a reservation and checked the place out.  It was probably one of the best dining experiences I’ve had in DC for the past few months.  The first thing I noticed was that the service was amazing - our waiter was laid back and friendly to the point that I thought he might have been taking bong hits in the kitchen except for the fact that was remarkably sharp and on-point -

The food was perfect - I had a perfectly grilled filet mignon and my companion had some well prepared (and fresh) crab cakes.

What’s more, they have a number of wine ‘flights,’ or samplers that allow you to try several of their wines.  We had the Alsace Summer flight, which consisted of a Willm Pinot Blanc, Trimbach Riesling and Trimbach Gewurztraminer.  The Riesling was particularly tasty.

I polished the meal off with a Grahams 10-year port and we shared a very solid creme brulet.

On a side note, when I initially ordered a glass of Warres Otima 1o-year the waiter came back and said, “Sorry, we are out of the Warres Otima but in its stead, would you prefer the Grahams 10-year?”  His use of old English phrasing, ‘in its stead’, almost made the night worthwhile in and of itself. 

All in all, my experience at Rock Creek Restaurant in Bethesda reminded me that DC can in fact be a great place to grab dinner, and I’m planning on putting the Rock Creek Restaurant in Friendship Heights on my short-list of places to try next.

I normally try to steer clear of writing about political issues on Drift Reality, mostly because my own background in the subject area is so pitiful.  However, sometimes a perspective just seems so intuitively sensible to me that I can’t help but offer up my opinion.

For a while now, the National Iranian American Council (of which I am a member) has been a voice of reason (as well as the only perceptible voice of the Iranian American community) with regard to foreign relations between the US and Iran.

Just a week back, their efforts to oppose US democracy/insurrectional funding in Iran was chronicled by the Washington Post.  Saman Zarifi from Human Rights Watch was quoted in the article as such: “Giving tens of millions of dollars to support Iranian activists inside Iran is counterproductive. First, Iranian activists don’t want it and can’t get it. Second, it supports Iranian government efforts to cast activists as foreign agents.”

Yesterday, Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute delivered an op-ed through the Post, defending democracy/insurrectional funding in Iran, where he claims, “Successful democracy promotion must have teeth.”

Personally, I wonder if Rubin has spent any substantial time in Iran or with Iranians for that matter.  It just strikes me as more than a little peculiar that many neo-cons who take hard line, passionate stances on foreign policy issues simply have no personal vested interest nor experience in said issues.

I’ve posted links to both the Rubin article as well as the NIAC Web site so you can decide for yourself about this issue.

Yesterday afternoon I was browsing through the weekend section of the Post when I read that a Korean-American comedian named Steve Byrne would be performing at the DC Improv. I had never heard of Byrne, nor had I been to the improv so it was certainly a bit of a shot in the dark. I checked out some of Byrne’s work on YouTube and it looked like what you would expect from an asian-american comedian - jokes about Bruce Lee, imitating his Mother’s fobby voice, etc., yet it still looked good enough to bare. After all, Byrne is a hoppa like myself and we have to support one another.

At any rate, I headed over to the show with a small group and we sat at the front table. We watched the host come out and perform a pretty solid routine before giving way to Ahmed Ahmed, who performed admirably himself.

Finally, Byrne came on and from the first minute I was pissing my pants from laughing so hard. His routine covered a wide spectrum of material, and it did as the YouTube clip indicate, cover his asian-american heritage - but that was far from the focal point of his act. He covered various aspects of relationships, culture, race, gender - always with a very distinctive fast-paced, physical presence that he managed to maintain through an act that must have run in excess of an hour and a half. From start to finish, he maintained that same energy and had the audience absolutely engaged and laughing themselves into a stupor.

Byrne made great use of the audience, bantering on several occasions with various people and even bringing one on stage for a ’sexy-stare around’ contest.

Well, here is a short (best I could find) clip of Byrne from YouTube - I’d recommend checking out his show if you get a chance.

Back in the day when I was at Georgetown, there was a place called Champs.  Champs was a filthy establishment where Georgetown jocks would mingle with drunken freshmen girls, and beer was the drink of choice.  I hated Champs with a passion and was relatively apathetic when it finally went out of business and was replaced by Blue Gin, which in many ways seems the antithesis of Champs.

Switching gears for a moment, I want to talk about Shabeh Jomeh.  Shabeh Jomeh refers to the beginning of the weekend for Persians and traditionally is a night for socializing.  In the US, there are numerous Shabeh Jomeh events where Persians meet up at bars, have drinks, look for spouses, etc.

So I’m on a mailing list for Shabeh Jomeh in DC and normally disregard the e-mails (to this date I have yet to actually attend one).  I received one this morning that did pique my curiosity a bit.

According to the e-mail, the Shabeh Jomeh coordinator met with the Blue Gin promoter to discuss terms of the Shabeh Jomeh events moving forward.  As the story goes, the Blue Gin promoter stated, “As you know, Georgetown is a predominantly white neighborhood.  Blue Gin hired me because they want to cater to that predominantly white crowd and they know that I can bring them that crowd. . .D.C. is different than New York.  In New York everyone hangs out together, but D.C. is segregated.  Latinos hang out with Latinos, blacks hang out with blacks, and whites hang out with whites.”

The end result of the conversation being, that the Shabeh Jomeh crowd could hold events at Blue Gin but they would be restricted to the second floor because they wouldn’t “blend” with the predominantly white crowd that normally frequented the establishment.

The incident is currently under legal investigation, and the attorneys recommended an ‘opinion poll’ be distributed.  Err…I think they mean a ‘push poll,’ but that’s okay, I don’t mind the push polling because otherwise I wouldn’t have found out about the racism at Blue Gin.

Anyway, Blue Gin sucked to begin with.  It almost sucked as bad as Smith Point.   Now, I can guarantee with 100% assurance that I will never return there and I have good reason to dissuade others from going there.

I walked into my apartment the other day and was not surprised to see a piece of junk mail that someone had slipped under my door. What I was surprised to see, was the new marketing message that Pizza Boli’s is using in their direct mail campaign.

I am no nutritionist but I am pretty sure that eating Pizza Boli’s is not considered healthy, nor is it the ‘healthier choice’ unless the alternative is eating a bowl of rusty nails covered with formaldehyde.

Whoever put their mailer together also could have chosen a better image than a plate of chicken wings and a ramican of ranch dressing to use in conjunction with their ‘eat healthy’ campaign.  They might as well have gotten Kirstie Alley to be their spokesmodel.

Pizza Boli’s direct mail campaign did give me a solution to a marketing challenge I had been working on:

I never knew what it was like to get kicked in the balls by someone with the leg strength of a professional soccer player until I decided to go into the DMV about a month ago to register my car in DC.

Click to view my blood pressure rising

First off let me warn all those who are considering this act to PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T REGISTER YOUR CAR IN DC.

Basically, if you buy your car out of state and then register your car in DC, there is something they call ‘Title Excise Tax.’  I call this ’sodomy with a nine-iron.’  I was charged $796.25 to register my car in DC.

Breath that in for one second.

You have to pay an absolutely ridiculous amount of money to the DC government just so you can have the luxury of driving your car on their torn-up roads, get a constant barrage of parking tickets, and have to deal with absolute neanderthals each and every time you need to interact with anyone who works at the DMV. 

Basically, there are some clever ways around the DC excise tax (PDF) that I urge you to familiarize yourself with before you even think about registering your car in DC, although I would recommend you to think about simply keeping the car registered wherever you got it and paying for a parking garage because it will honestly be cheaper. 

I am generally a pretty easygoing guy and I don’t hold a lot of hate in my heart.  I get upset with people sometimes but I always let them know and I try to get over it.  If I find that someone is bringing more negativity into my life than positivity, then I basically remove them from my life because I don’t like a lot of drama.

That being said, if there is one group I honestly can say I hate and wish would fall off the face of the earth: it is everyone affiliated with the DMV in Washington, DC.  From the meter bitches who constantly leave tickets on my car; to the cops who are basically 10 IQ points away from wearing a helmet to work; to the people who work at the DMV offices who were recruited out of the Ninth Circle of Hell. 

I wish someone would come in a big black truck and take all of them away to a special camp somewhere, where they would be routinely flogged and have lye poured into their eyes on a daily basis.

Why do they suck so bad?

1. If volume of parking tickets was an indicator of the safety of a city, then DC would be the Garden of Eden.  Unfortunately, it is not.  While all sorts of crimes are going on in other parts of DC, I have gotten two parking tickets in residential neighborhoods, each for $50, for not having a front license plate on my Landrover Freelander.  I am planning to dispute both.  Basically, I have heard that the DMV peons show up to court on an infrequent basis so you have a good shot at getting out of your ticket if you just show up.  I’m going to spend the next several days figuring out how to get out of these tickets and then share my knowledge with the world, and search-engine optimize it so that anyone in DC who ever Googles “get out of parking ticket” will find my page and automatically know how to get out of paying their fine to the DMV.  Cops - why don’t you go stop a crime or something instead of waddling your fat ass through suburban DC looking for cars to ticket.  It makes me think that there is some sort of raffle for most parking tickets given out with first prize being a lifetime supply of hot dogs and slurpies from 7-11.
2. DC Excise Tax is a euphemism for rape - I have had to go through the car registration process these past few monthsand was forced to pay about $800 in DC Excise Tax, which I am going to blog about in a separate post because I want to make sure that my words on that are search engine optimized as well. 
3. The final straw was this AM, when I was driving by a cop who had already pulled two people over for no reason in particular, and as I pulled by, asked me to stop.  The idiot then looked at me and said “You need to stop before the crosswalk!!!” I proceeded to look down at the street and see that my car was literally one foot into the crosswalk.  I just stared at him with disdain and hatred and he let me go because he had to ticket the other two cars he had already pulled over.  I wish pestilence upon him.