What's In a Name? My Blog Needs Your Ideas

So, if certain technical hurdles can be overcome I will, before summer's end, be blogging on washingtonpost.com. The first hurdle, however, is coming up with a name. Will you help me?

Obviously "John Kelly's Voxford" isn't gonna fly. But "John Kelly's Washington" is no good either, since the aim is to distinguish the blog from my column of that name. Taking a cue from Voxford I could go with "John Kelly's Vashington," but that just sounds like a vampire pronouncing it. ("I vant to suck your blood. And read your blog.")

It'd be nice to go with something involving my name. I wasn't crazy at first about Post columnist Marc Fisher's blog's name: Raw Fisher. It seemed unsanitary, like an improperly cleaned cutting board. But it's grown on me and now I think it's among the best on our site. Joel Achenbach probably hated his last name as a kid (it sounds like a German trying not to vomit) but it came in helpful when it was time to dub the Achenblog. I don't really have a name that lends itself to that sort of transformation. "Kelly's Heroes"? "Kelly Roll"? "A John-diced View"? I kind of like "Johnorrhea" (catch it!) but that's even grosser than "Raw Fisher."

So, maybe something that doesn't include my name but that hints at what the blog is about, which will be tidbits from the Washington area and from my own brain pan. But call it something like "Capital Comment" and people will think it's about politics, which it won't be.

Oh well, that's enough dithering over what it shouldn't be. Tell me what it should be. Or what it might be. We're brainstorming here, folks, so all suggestions are appreciated. Leave 'em as a comment or drop a line to kellyj[at]washpost.com. If I pick yours you will receive some sort of probably worthless prize, in addition to my undying digital gratitude. Have a great weekend.

All the News That Fits

I emerged from the Farragut North Metro yesterday morning and collided with a metaphor. A man and a woman were hunched over the newspaper street racks at the corner of Connecticut and L NW. They were scraping the names of newspapers from the brown metal vending machines.

The Financial Times had already come off. The Miami Herald had been reduced to "Miam" and the Richmond Times Dispatch was disappearing, one letter at a time. Those papers, I was told, had decided not to vend from the street racks anymore. Some, like the Financial Times, you could still get by subscription and at news stands. Others might be harder to get in D.C.

Street boxes in Washington for out of town newspapers have always been a bit of a vanity exercise. Surely it costs more than 75 cents for the Miami Herald or Los Angeles Times to wind up in downtown Washington. But if you worked for those papers you felt a little frisson every time you walked past. Of course, Washington bureaus are being decimated so there's just as little chance of an LA or Miami staffer walking past as there is of a Washingtonian fingering three quarters and saying, "You know what I need this morning? News from Miami." He can get it for free on the web now.

They weren't scraping off all the names. A few newspapers remained--and those free real estate books. And The Washington Post and the Washington Times still have their own separate street racks. But the impressively huge monster rack was being whittled away from the inside. (There's another metaphor!) What will be done with it when it's empty, and when all the other street racks--with their signature message: "Use any combination of coins," and their unspoken "take no more than one paper" honor code--are no longer needed?

Dump them in the ocean, I guess, an artificial reef for the fishes. If there are any fishes left, that is....

The Most Gargoylish Friday Ever

In my manic final days in Oxford I raced around trying to do all the things I'd never found time for in the previous 10 months. I bought a pair of brown brogues at Ducker's on the Turl. I read a book in the Radcliffe Camera, the circular, light-filled reading room that is one of the Bodleian Library's signature elements. And I climbed to the top of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. This is the church:



This is the steeple:


Open the doors and see all the...gargoyles:








Finally, here's my favorite shot:


I wonder: Does that pigeon dream of being a gargoyle? Or does that gargoyle dream of being a pigeon?

And Finally...
I'm slowly lowering my body into the sitz bath that is The Washington Post. Alice Reid, my colleague (and Oxford alum; who knew?), is ably handling this summer's Send a Kid to Camp campaign. That's The Post's annual fund drive for Camp Moss Hollow, a summer camp for underprivileged children. I hope you'll consider making a donation to this worthy cause.

And if you're in the D.C. area, help me out: My columns don't write themselves, you know, so if you have any ideas for when I start columnizing later this summer, drop me a line: kellyj[at]washpost.com. I'm especially interested in questions for Answer Man.

Thanks, and have a great weekend. I think I'll be mowing the lawn again.

Signs o' the Times

Clearing out some of my iPhoto catalogue I came across a few typically English shots. This sign was tacked to a door at Green College:



There are two things going on here. The first is the expression "on the latch," a veddy British expression which means to leave a door so it doesn't lock. I don't think we have that phrase in the U.S. The great U.K. pop band Squeeze includes the line in its song "If I Didn't Love You":
Taking a bite on a biscuit
The record jumps on a scratch
Tonight it's love by the fire
The door of your love's on the latch

Then there's the sign's final authoritarian note: "It is in your interest." I love that.

And I loved this sign at a butcher's in Oxford's Covered Market:


"Hand raised" pork pies. I can just see the little baby pork pies, no bigger then a biscuit, being hand-fed from a bottle of warm gravy. If only they were free-range, hand-raised pork pies, gamboling about the kitchen.

Assault With a Battery, or, 'It's Alive!'

I understand that there are certain native cultures in Africa where a person's wealth is determined by how many cows he owns. What's important isn't the condition of the cows, but the number. Ten scrawny, emaciated cows are preferable to five fat and healthy cows. We have the same thing in America, but we do it with cars instead of cows. Why have one flawless Toyota Camry when you can have a rusty Renault Le Car, a Ford Taurus with power-steering issues and a wheel-less Plymouth Duster up on cinder blocks in your front yard? That is true status.

For example, I own three cars. At least two-thirds of them aren't running right now. That's because I abandoned them for 10 months when we swanned off to Oxford. Now, there is a way to prepare a vehicle for an extended hibernation: flushing the fluids, raising the tires off the ground, disconnecting the battery, swaddling the entire machine in Barbicide-soaked canvas and parking it in a climate-controlled limestone cave run by Mormons. But I didn't do any of that. The Mini we left under a friend's carport. The Mazda MPV we paid to store in the parking lot of a place in Laurel that repairs recreational vehicles. It looks as if the Mini will--fingers crossed--just need a new battery. The minivan required more work to coax it back to life.

My Lovely Wife and I actually hadn't seen the place where the minivan was parked. After our hurried departure last year my friend Pat graciously agreed to bring it over there. Yesterday Ruth and I drove up in a rented car. The minivan was at the back of the weedy, gravel lot, sandwiched between a rusted trailer and a hulking pull-behind RV. It's hard to make a minivan look small, but small ours looked. And pathetic: dwarfed by the vehicles around it, grimy, leaf-strewn, the windshield wipers fused to the windshield, the doors stuck shut from months of disuse. It was the automotive equivalent of a person in an old folk's home: vibrant when it went in, brought down by its surroundings. Worst of all, the front left tire was totally flat. The rubber had, to use an English term I've always liked, "perished." You could see that where the rubber met the road, so to speak, it had split. The steel belts were poking through at the bottom like threads in a frayed pair of jeans. Out came the tire-changing tools.

Who invented the screw? Archimedes? Well thank you, Archimedes. There's little more satisfying than using the principal of the inclined plane to lift two tons of metal. Up went the MPV, off came the lug nuts. The wheel was stuck, of course, but the skillful application of a lug wrench (bang! bang!) and it came off. The space-saver spare was a little squishy but I stuck it on and it was time to jump start the slumbering beast.

Extremely prudent people will tell you that the proper way to jump start a car is by attaching the cables between the positive posts of the two batteries and between the negative post of the booster car's battery and a grounded location on the dead car. But that never seems to work for me which is why I do it old school: positive to positive and negative to negative baby! Which worked. We took back roads home, just in case any of the other tires decided to perish, and dropped it at the corner garage for a check-up. The Mini should get a new battery today.

As for the other 33 percent of our cars, it's a 1968 Datsun roadster that I consigned to a barn in Leesburg owned by a guy who stores old sports cars. He said he'd start it every few weeks and drive it around the block to keep the juices flowing. I hope to pick it up this weekend. I'll bring my jumper cables, just in case.

Show & Tell
If you're curious about what I was doing in Oxford, there's a little mention at the end of Sarah Laurence's blog. Sarah is an American writer blogging about her time in Oxford and her academic husband, Henry, came to my final presentation.

Amber (Well, Greenish) Waves of Grain

In the end, it was the most painfree trip we'd taken during our year abroad. No Heathrow Terminal 5 luggage roulette, like with Rome. No cattle-call RyanAir boarding hell, like with Dublin. No last-minute snag with the dog's crate, like when we'd moved to England in the first place. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing became Oxford like our leaving of it.

We'd been fretting over our luggage--two checked cases each, stuffed to bursting, weighed with a borrowed scale--but each was under the limit. If you were standing near the British Air baggage check-in yesterday morning and saw a family of four high-fiving each other after each suit case was hefted onto the scale, that was us. The flight was a bit bumpy but BA provides a nice U.S. re-entry service: just watch "Semi-Pro" and "The Simpsons" on the little video screen and you're re-acclimated to the States.

Our driver was waiting for us at Dulles. I don't think I'll ever get over the thrill of seeing my name in Magic-Marker on a clipboard. "Why yes, I'm John Kelly." Then to BA cargo where, after 14 hours in his crate, Charlie the dog was set free, no worse for wear. He seemed to take special pleasure in that first long pee on American soil.

We climbed back into the van and proceeded to...wait in a traffic jam. That's when I truly knew we were back in Washington, a place where any trip can take anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours. But I wasn't in any hurry. It was costing me the same no matter how long the ride. And I felt no sympathy for the driver, who said he had to pick up another customer in Gaithersburg at 4 p.m. Let's see, our plane was scheduled to land at 1:30, we had to clear Customs and pick up a dog, then drive around the Beltway to Silver Spring? And he thought he could get to Gaithersburg by 4? The fool!

In the end, we arrived home at 3:59 and I wished the driver luck with his ion propulsion-drive system.

After 10 months on Osberton Road our Amurican house seemed huge. Huge but welcoming. Our tenants, Gordon and Leslie, had left it in just as good shape as we'd left our Oxford house. The only glitch was that the lawn service we'd contacted hadn't mowed since Gordon and Leslie moved out a month ago. The front yard was a wonderful ocean of grass, like something from the prairie.


I don't even know where to start with cutting it. I think I may need a scythe. Or some sheep.

The Sun Shines on Oxford

Charlie's walk, the final ritual that I've done every morning for the last 10 months. The streets are bit different at 4 a.m. A man I recognize as a homeless Big Issue seller from St. Giles bicycles past on the Woodstock Road, followed 20 yards behind by his dog, trotting to keep up. Perhaps they do this every morning.

Charlie and I walk around the basketball courts near the radio station, go past the playground then turn at the grass tennis courts to make our daily loop. A top window is open in the old folks' home, as it always is. I've heard that the lady inside throws meat to the foxes. I've never seen anyone at the window and I don't this morning.

Behind the tennis courts and behind the back gardens of Osberton Road. The bell in the chapel tower of St. Edwards School chimes 4:30. Charlie and I turn east through the tennis court parking lot. And there, over the chimney pots of North Oxford, is something I haven't seen in my 10 months here: a sunrise. Partly-cloudy ones are the best, the sun painting the grayish clouds in hues of bright pink and tangerine.

I've forgotten my camera this morning, so I can't take a picture. But you can't capture a sunrise in a photograph. You can't capture a city in a blog, either. Thanks for watching me try. The next sunrise I see will be in Washington. I promise to blog there, too, and I hope you'll join me.