Bethesda: There’s a chair in a netherspace in the kitchen where the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal grows. In the pile I came across a Post story about DC’s very young Mayor Fenty taking over the school system here. April Witt’s two-jump feature sketched the history of chaos in the schools administration Fenty plans to fix.

From the second jump:

In the wake of [a report that cried for reform] the school board fired Superintendent Andrew Jenkins. At an extraordinarily emotional board meeting, outraged Jenkins supporters hurled water pitchers, glasses and nameplates. One member, Erika Landberg, who was voting to oust Jenkins, was hit in the head. She needed stitches. The offices of some board members were trashed.

The story goes on to describe personnel records hidden inside of walls, schools that opened three weeks late, chokings, godfathers within the system, a lieutenant general superintendent who said that actual war was easier than working the schools. The point being, that’s how bad it can get when schools are seen as jobs systems and political stepping stones to other elected offices.**

And then, speaking of how bad a black eye can get, yesterday, the Post reported a shooting involving security guards at Walter Reed Army hospital, where services for soldiers are said to be way below subpar. One guard called the other, an Iraq war vet, a retard. Then the insulted party fired at his co-worker ten times. He didn’t hit anyone, but he did hit two cars and a pole. It couldn’t have been relaxing for a soldier with PTSD sitting alone hour after hour in a darkened hospital room (as a different Post story reported this week) and hoping somehow to put the violence of Iraq behind him.

But it's not all nightmare in Washington: right now the city looks magnificent. It's lush and green; there's an abundance of parks. Almost every day, afternoon thunderstorms, then sunshine. In Charlottesville, Virginia, on Tuesday, we saw rain that blew sideways and a weird green sky. Thursday, in Washington, the paddle boats at the Tidal Basin – where the cherry blossoms are all gone now – looked like sleeping mini-whales as the afternoon rain smacked down on them. When I was five or six or seven (or maybe all) I used to fish for sunfish (catch and release) and watch the paddle boats in front of the Jefferson Memorial. I doubt that anyone has ever proposed sinking the paddle boats at the Tidal Basin. It just wouldn't do.

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Bring it: Josh Kamensky of Eric Garcetti's office emailed me that Eric has challenged KCRW to a dragon boat race on Echo Park Lake.

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(**Patronage up close: For four summers as a kid, I attended a public tennis summer day camp. It was run by an extraordinary person, the late Mrs. Walker (Margaret Peters Walker), a black woman who had broken the color barrier in her youth as a pro tennis player. She ran the camp for something like two decades: she was disciplined and energetic, the camp was popular, a model of race and class diversity that worked beautifully. Kids came from all over the city. Then, the last year I attended, Miss Walker was fired out of the blue and replaced with a much younger woman who came to work and did nothing. The counselors openly called her "Marion Barry’s friend over there in the shade with the Gatorade." Morning assembly stopped. Everything stopped. Half the kids stopped coming. The camp turned into a place to hang out – last time I was there. I couldn't tell more, because I stopped going, too.)