Latest news with #GoldenGateBridge
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Muskingum River reopens to navigation; May 31 celebration includes free rides, family fun
COLUMBUS — The Muskingum River Parkway is set to fully reopen for navigation for the first time since 2020. According to an announcement from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the reopening of Rokeby Lock No. 8 will restore full navigational access from Marietta to Zanesville. A celebration is planned for 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 31 at McConnelsville Lock No. 7, 698 E. Riverside Drive, McConnelsville. The event will feature free pontoon boat rides, offered by ODNR's Division of Parks and Watercraft staff. Pontoon boat rides are weather and water-level dependent. In the event of high river levels due to recent rainfall, rides may be canceled for safety. 'Restoring navigation to the entire length of the Muskingum is about more than boats on the water,' said ODNR Director Mary Mertz in the release. 'It's about preserving a remarkable piece of our heritage and celebrating the communities and families who've cherished this river for generations.' The Muskingum River State Park is home to one of the nation's last remaining systems of hand-operated locks, according to the announcement. Ten of the 11 original locks remain in operation, allowing recreational boaters to travel from Marietta to Zanesville. The locks and dams were constructed in the 1800s under the direction of West Point graduate Major Samuel Curtis. By 1841, the system connected to the Ohio and Erie Canal, ushering in an era of prosperity for towns along the waterway. Stockport Lock #6 is another stop along the Muskingum River that is open to boaters. In 2001, the system was designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, placing it alongside American engineering marvels like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building and Hoover Dam, according to the announcement. With navigation from the Ohio River through Zanesville Lock #10 restored, ODNR invites Ohioans to rediscover this historic waterway and experience the same scenic beauty and cultural richness that once drew settlers, traders and riverboat pilots to its banks nearly two centuries ago. This story was created by Jane Imbody, jimbody@ with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process. Learn more at or share your thoughts at with our News Automation and AI team. This article originally appeared on Zanesville Times Recorder: Restoration of lock will allow boaters to travel Muskingum River again
Telegraph
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘Roger did not get the joke': Why A View to a Kill is Bond at his ridiculous best
There's a rule about the Roger Moore Bond films: the more ridiculous and less believable it is that Rodge himself is performing the stunts – whether he's skiing off a 7,000ft mountain in The Spy Who Loved Me or clambering across a train in Octopussy – the more entertaining he is. That's never truer than in A View to a Kill, Moore's final outing as 007, which premiered 40 years ago. Rodge – a less-than-spritely 57 by this point – escapes KGB agents by snowboarding through the mountains of Siberia (cut to a cover of The Beach Boys ' California Girls) and dangles from the swinging ladder of a high-speed fire engine. In the end, he fights Christopher Walken at 750 ft on the Golden Gate Bridge. Moore's age is a common criticism of A View to a Kill, which – it's fair to say – is not the most critically adored Bond film. Moore himself named A View to a Kill as his least favourite due to violence. And when I ask director John Glen where A View to a Kill sits within his five films as director, he responds, 'Roger was knocking on a bit. We all knew, including Roger, that it was his last Bond.' But A View to a Kill is a perfect swansong for the japery of the Roger Moore era. All the distinct pleasures of Moore's tenure are present and correct and magnified by the fact that Bond is – in Moore's own words – 'a bit long in the tooth'. There's thrilling stunt work by stunt men who are definitely not Roger Moore; knowing gags that raise an eyebrow to the audience; the queasy canoodling of any young woman within his vicinity; and the relentless innuendo ('I'll fill you in later, Moneypenny… I'm an early riser myself…I got off eventually', etc). It's all right there in the pre-title sequence. After the Beach Boys snowboard escape – a brilliantly inventive chase – Bond sneaks into an iceberg-shaped submarine, immediately patronises the delectable helmswoman ('Be a good girl would you and put her in automatic') then bumps the controls so she falls onto his bed. But 57 or not, Bond is still Bond, and when the titles kick in – a day-glo sequence set to the walloping synths of the Duran Duran theme – it's absolutely electric, charged by an excitement that's unique to Bond films. A View to a Kill also has two of the great Eighties Bond baddies: Walken's Max Zorin, a maniac industrialist who was born of a Nazi genetics experiment (naturally); and Grace Jones as Bond girl-cum-henchwoman, May Day. In the film, May Day parachutes off the Eiffel Tower – the film's signature stunt, performed by BJ Worth – while behind the scenes Grace Jones got on Rodge's wick. 'I've always said if you've nothing nice to say about someone, then you should say nothing,' wrote Moore in reference to Jones. 'So I'll say nothing.' Roger Moore had hinted that every Bond film would be his last for several years before A View to a Kill. It was all a bit of a game to increase his pay cheque next time around – to add a few more double-Os, perhaps. But writing in his memoir, Moore reflected that he really was taking stock of his career and thinking about winding down when producer Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli asked him to play Bond again. Moore was game. 'I was pretty fit and still able to remember lines,' he wrote. The script – by Richard Maibaum and co-producer Michael G Wilson – had little to do with the Ian Fleming short story, From a View to a Kill, other than the title and Paris setting. In the film, Zorin plans to kickstart an earthquake that will wipe out Silicon Valley, allowing him to take control of the booming microchip business. Yes, Moore's flared tuxedo may have been a touch behind the times, but Zorin was of the technological moment. Forty years on, Zorin now looks like the original tech bro, prefiguring all those jokes about how tech billionaires such as Elon Musk are almost real-life Bond villains, with their plans to travel to space and conquer Mars. 'Maybe he saw my films!' says John Glen, laughing. Zorin's plans were foiled before production began, though. The famed 007 stage at Pinewood Studios, which was set to hold Zorin's network on mines, burned down in June 1984, while being used for Ridley Scott's Legend, and had to be rebuilt. As for Zorin himself, David Bowie was offered the role but declined – 'I didn't want to spend five months watching my double fall off mountains,' Bowie said – and Sting had meetings. Christopher Walken, however, was a different class. He was already an Oscar winner by this time, having won a Best Supporting Actor statue in 1979 for The Deer Hunter. 'They sent me a script, it seemed like a good job,' Walken later recalled. 'I knew there were lots of reasons to do it. How many times does an actor get to be in a Bond film? That would just be fun to do that.' With his off-world stare and trademark lilt ('You am- USE me, Mr Bond'), Walken is an elite level Bond villain. A by-product of being genetically engineered by Nazis, we are told, is also being psychotic. He drops uncooperative business associates out of his airship and laughs to himself as he machine-guns an army of his own workers. Moore later pointed to that moment as the reason A View to a Kill was his least favourite Bond. 'Too violent,' Roger said in 1996. 'There was no slow-motion, blood-spewing Sam Peckinpah action, but with the machine-guns and thousands of people getting blown away, the violence was too gratuitous.' Walken certainly seems to relish in the violence of the massacre. 'I just let him go,' says Glen about Walken's machine-gun performance. Elsewhere, Zorin kills Patrick Macnee's MI6 agent Sir Godfrey Tibbett, putting an end to what was essentially a dream team pairing of James Bond and John Steed (whom Macnee played in ITV's The Avengers) and forcing Moore's most serious moment in the film. The story begins with 007 attending a horse auction at Zorin's estate. Zorin is both a racehorse breeder and cheat – the horses are doped by his Nazi scientist creator. Bond wanders around spying on Zorin with massive polarising sunglasses – the most glaringly conspicuous bit of gadgetry in Q's arsenal – and chats up much younger women. 'I was hoping we'd spend the evening together,' he tells sexy geologist Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) 60 seconds after meeting her. Bond meets his match in the bedroom, however, when he slips between the sheets with Grace Jones's May Day, who looks like she could ravage Moore to a pulp. During filming. Jones surprised him in bed with a menacingly large dildo. Moore did not appreciate it. 'We played a few tricks, as we always did on the Bond films,' says John Glen. 'She was in on it... It's the first time I'd ever known him not to take the joke. He got a bit upset about it, I must say. Normally it was him playing a joke on everyone else.' Though Grace Jones wrote glowingly about Moore in her autobiography, calling him a 'softie', Moore was less complimentary. He described in his memoir how she played loud heavy metal in her dressing room, which ruled out an afternoon nap. 'I did ask Grace to turn it down several times, to no avail,' Moore wrote. 'One day I snapped. I marched into her room, pulled the plug out and then went back to my room, picked up a chair and flung it at the wall. The dent is still there.' The scenes at Zorin's estate were filmed at Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. Glen recalls that Walken had a tendency to get bored between set-ups and wander off. 'There was a lot of waiting around,' he says. 'Christopher would go off for a walk in the hundreds of acres of woods and we'd have to send search parties. In the end I delegated one assistant director to watch him all the time so we could keep tabs by radio. It became a game. Christopher would watch this assistant and the moment the assistant took his eyes off him, he was gone!' Production also visited Paris to shoot major action sequences, including May Day's BASE jump from the Eiffel Tower. Parachuting off the Eiffel Tower was suggested by stuntman BJ Worth during Moonraker, and had appeared in a draft of the Moonraker script. With the stunt greenlit for A View to a Kill, Worth and skydiving pal Don Caltvedt performed 22 jumps from a hot air balloon. They had to get the precise timing to safely open the parachute from 900 ft and clear the outward slope of the tower. They worked out that they needed to pull their chutes after three seconds, which they timed with the changing pitch of the wind in their ears. But getting permissions in Paris was complicated. As well as the Eiffel Tower BASE jump, they needed approval for veteran stunt driver Rémy Julienne to drive a cut-in-half Renault 11 around a one-way system (going the wrong way, of course) along the Seine. The filmmakers had to schmooze numerous local authorities for the necessary permissions. But plans were almost compromised when in April 1984, ahead of filming, a London couple sneaked past security measures at the tower and jumped with parachutes hidden in backpacks. Paris authorities were concerned that the couple got the idea after hearing about the upcoming 007 stunt, and almost withdrew the film's permissions. Fortunately, BJ Worth was allowed to make the jump, which he did from a driving board-like platform. (Glen recalls his reaction to first seeing the platform during practices: 'I said, 'You can't use that! This is a world-renowned landmark! You can't change the silhouette of it!') Incredibly, Worth fell asleep on the scaffolding at the top of the tower while he waited 15 minutes for a camera reload. His adrenaline had been pumping so hard in the build-up that he shut down as soon as there was a delay. The jump was a success and Cubby Broccoli declined to risk filming a second attempt. However, backup jumper Don Caltvedt was miffed that he didn't get his turn, so crept up the tower early in the morning with a friend and craftily jumped without anyone knowing – or so he thought. The crew was already setting up for the next day's shooting and Caltvedt plummeted past Glen and his team. Worth fired him on the spot, and the Paris authorities almost pulled permissions once again 'I was very upset about that,' remembers Glen. 'It was incredibly irresponsible to jeopardise our shoot in Paris. To do jumps on the Eiffel Tower we had to get top permissions and had to assure them that we wouldn't do anything to embarrass them.' There were no such problems with permissions when the production moved to San Francisco for the second half of the film. The San Francisco mayor, Dianne Feinstein, was happy to host Bond and was especially enamoured by Roger Moore. 'It was lucky and fortunate enough that she was one of the rare people that preferred me as Bond instead of Sean [Connery],' Moore later said on a making of documentary. 'And so, we got all sorts of permits.' 'Her first question was, 'How much are you going to spend in the city?'' says Glen. 'We said, 'About four million'. She said, 'Do anything you like!' When we told her we wanted to burn down City Hall she said, 'If it's OK by the fire chief, it's OK by me.'' Rather than actually burning down San Francisco City Hall, Glen and his crew lined the roof with gas burners. (Torching the building is one of several Zorin plans to bump off Bond rather than just shooting him on the spot. See also: challenging 007 to a horse race rigged with traps, and locking him in a car and pushing it into a lake). In the following action sequence, Bond and Stacey Sutton steal a fire engine and race through San Francisco. Stacey steers as Bond clings to the ladder. It took almost three weeks to complete, with shots of a stuntman hanging off the ladder and dodging oncoming traffic, spliced with close-ups of Moore. Critics and fans have poked fun at A View to a Kill for several shots of stunt doubles who are quite obviously not Roger Moore – but that's all part of the fun of it. Glen laughs about the fact he switched Moore for stunt double Martin Grace at every opportunity. 'Roger wasn't particularly athletic,' says Glen. 'He couldn't really run very well. We'd always stick Martin Grace in where we could to double for him!' It certainly wasn't Moore at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge for the climactic punch-up between Bond and Zorin, after Zorin's airship gets stuck on the north tower. Though Moore did climb up one of the replica bridge sections built at Pinewood. 'I wasn't paid enough to climb the real one,' he later said. Much of the fight is taken from shooting on the Pinewood replicas, but the shots that are taken from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge are stomach-lurchingly impressive – Martin Grace doubles for Moore on the massive sloping cables. 'We were limited with what we could do because we were right above all the traffic,' says Glen. 'But we did a bit of stuntmen fighting with safety wires on them.' Zorin, unhinged until the end, laughs as he falls to his death from the bridge. Walken was laughing for real. 'I was hanging there and I was about to fall off the bridge on to some mattresses,' he said. 'It struck me as funny, that's all.' A View to a Kill premiered in San Francisco on May 22, 1985, the last of Roger Moore's seven films as 007. Though not Moore's finest outing, A View to a Kill still demonstrates the magic of his tenure – his screen persona. That's why even at 57, he gets away with it. You don't need to believe that Roger Moore can kill a man with his bare hands or snowboard away from the KGB. The film would also facilitate a necessary change for the Bond series. After A View to a Kill, the Bond team set out to find a more serious actor and ultimately cast Timothy Dalton for 1987's more Fleming-esque The Living Daylights, which Glen also directed. 'We had to make a radical change,' says Glen. 'Roger's Bonds were light-hearted. Timothy Dalton's Bond was more akin to Sean Connery. We were going back to the darker, laconic type of Bond. We had to go back to the original Fleming concept… We'd had our fun with Roger.'
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘Something to be proud of': how an Irish town got a sewage makeover – and stopped discharging its waste into the sea
'Who'd want to live next to a sewage treatment plant?' asks the architect Andrew Clancy, who with his business partner Colm Moore runs the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore. Who indeed, yet they have had to find a way to overcome precisely this difficulty. In the coastal town of Arklow, 40 miles south of the Irish capital, they have designed a wastewater facility that seeks to act as a landmark for the town, an agent of its renewal and growth, and a good neighbour to the homes and shops and places of work that it is hoped will be built alongside. The plant consists of two calm oblongs of mysterious scale, their long horizontals echoing the line where the sea meets the sky, plus a third more domestic structure alongside, all in a marine blue-green colour you could call pale teal. The project is in illustrious company. The tradition of making dirty functional structures into objects of pride and beauty gave the world such things as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the noble, deco-ish ventilation towers of the Mersey Tunnel in Liverpool and the Wirral. When Joseph Bazalgette installed London's sewage system in the 1860s and 70s, he created parks and gardens and well-appointed public spaces on the river embankments that contain giant sewers, and ornate structures such as the neo-Byzantine pumping station in Abbey Mills, east London. The Arklow project, argues Clancy, is an opportunity to make visible the billions that are usually spent unseen on the public good of clean water. Arklow (pop 13,399) has until recently dumped its untreated waste straight into the River Avoca, just before it flows into the sea. Beaches were unusable, the smell bad. The town, which like many in Ireland faces pressures of population growth, could not expand, for fear of worsening the already dire situation. Something obviously had to be done, but it has taken more than 30 years since the first attempt to build a suitable treatment plant there for it to come into being. Eventually, Uisce Éireann, the state-owned company formed in 2013 to manage Ireland's water, took it on and chose a site that would result in the least possible energy use and carbon impact. It was also what might be called a prime location, on a spit of land between the sea and the river, close to the harbour, with lovely views all around. If Arklow, released from the restrictions of its waste problem, were to grow, this would be the obvious place for a new neighbourhood. So there was an issue of architecture as well as engineering, and a practice was sought who could civilise this mucky mechanical beast. Clancy Moore, until then best known for clever, playful, subtle private houses, with absolutely no experience of work of this scale or type, were not an obvious choice. But, according to Clancy, they offered a 'conversation' with the many experts and contractors performing the essential task of making the plant work, rather than telling them what to do. There were, under the overall leadership of Arup and Ayesa, engineers for structure, for fluid dynamics, for ecology, even for odour. Rather than moan about the impact of technical demands on the aesthetics of a design, Clancy says, the idea was to use them as a spur to new thinking. 'We tend to never disagree with an imposition,' he says, 'but to let them into the heart of the project.' The result is not a case of designing, as he puts it, a cosmetic 'wrapper' on the plant, but of collaboratively rethinking the whole assembly. You may be familiar with the conventional sewage farm, with rows of round tanks in a field, where fluid is pumped from one to another in the multistage process of purification. Here the idea was to stack them on several levels, with one big pump taking the waste to the start and highest point of the process, from where gravity would take it through the rest of its journey to cleanliness, until a 900 metre-long outfall pipe takes it out to sea. This layout means that the plant occupies less land than a conventional farm, such that some of it can be turned to other uses, including rewilding with gorse and pines. The tanks and pipes can be concealed from view. There's also some freedom in the way the different parts can be arrayed: Clancy Moore chose to distribute them in two blocks set at an angle to each other, which helps to break down their mass and sit more comfortably in the landscape. Inside there's a multilevel world of tubes and cylinders and gantries and slow-moving mechanisms, an earthy version of an old movie's vision of the future, amazingly unsmelly (those odour engineers having done their job), with a sea breeze wafting through. There's a seeing-how-things-work fascination to the place, as in cutaway drawings of machines in a children's book. Two windows, one looking on to nearby hills and one to the sea, will give views of existing and planned windfarms, situating the plant in a larger landscape of enlightened infrastructure. It's a three-dimensional educational opportunity, of which school trips will take advantage. The exterior is almost all a matter of long sloping louvers – designed to smooth the flow of air through the buildings – made of corrugated fibre cement board. It's a workaday material given a bit of zing by its zigzagging profile at the corners and by that minty colour, derived from the colours of local boats, from the strip of some of Arklow's sports teams, and from a sea thistle on the nearby beaches. Pleasure is taken in the way things are put together, in the fixings that stop the boards blowing away, in the rough-textured concrete feet that take the steel frame to the ground. The third, smaller building, containing laboratories and offices, is a more refined and playful version of its big siblings, with pawky angles and fleeting resemblances to a human face. The whole sits companionably in a harbourside terrain of containers and sheds, while also intimating the domestic scale of the hoped-for future development. Clancy says that the new facility could help Arklow go 'from being a problem child to something to be proud of'. In practical terms, it allows the population to triple. But would you want to live next to it? With the sea and the view and the handsome not-smelly structures, why not.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Massive Waves Slam Fort Point, San Francisco (Video)
Of all the world's novelty waves, the weird and the wonderful aquatic eccentricities masquerading as occasional surf spots, few are as iconic as Fort Point, San Francisco. It's a wave breaking beneath one of the modern wonders of the world, a feat of engineering, the Golden Gate Bridge. And recently, with plenty of swell slamming northern California, Fort Point was firing. At times, it was even some of the biggest conditions seen in recent memory, with waves breaking far beyond the normal takeoff zone and, instead, way out in the strait, beneath the Golden Gate herself. Check out the heroics below: On Wednesday, the National Weather Service warned of the incoming large surf ahead of this ride above, which was captured the day after on Thursday, March 27th. The NWS cautioned on X: 'Incoming long period very high northwesterly swell will result in breaking waves of 25 to 30 feet (15 to 20 feet for Northern Monterey Bay). Dangerous swimming and surfing conditions and localized beach erosion. Sneaker waves can unexpectedly run significantly farther up the beach than normal, including over rocks and jetties. Remain out of the water to avoid hazardous conditions. Never turn your back on the ocean!'The day after, things cleaned up a bit, and saw some more manageable, yet still epic, Fort Point conditions: And luckily, during this run of swell, there's been no reports of rescues – unlike back in February, when an unidentified surfer broke his board at Fort Point, and was whisked out to sea with an outgoing tide. In that situation, 'firefighters and police officers on rescue boats, rescue watercraft, and shore-deployed rescue swimmers,' were deployed according to the San Francisco Fire Department. Thankfully, the surfer made it out okay.
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The real Washington is being hurt by Trump's recklessness
For conservatives, certain American cities are also epithets. Those upset about changes in culture attack New York City. Those worried about the excesses of liberal policy blame San Francisco. Those angry about crime bring up Chicago. And everyone hates on Washington. Those other cities are fortunate that they have a reputation outside of those attacks. Even if you agree with the criticism, you might also have warm feelings about bodegas or the Golden Gate Bridge or John Hughes movies. But for most of America, Washington, D.C., where my family and I have lived for the last 16 years, is not a real place; it's just a shorthand for the federal government — less a city than a synecdoche. And for too long, even those of us who like to see the government solve Americans' problems and appreciate the work that gets done here have played along with it. We've waved it off at family gatherings when someone went on a tear about the evils of Washington. We've overexplained: Sure, I live in D.C., but my heart is really back in Kansas or Oregon or wherever. And we've ignored it when President Donald Trump has called the city a 'dirty, crime-ridden death trap' and a 'nightmare of murder and crime' that is 'disgusting' and full of 'filth.' Now, Washington — the real Washington — is paying the price. As Trump has begun firing thousands of federal workers and ending programs that supported thousands more in the nonprofit sector, the nation's capital is being hit hard. Even if you agree with Trump's vision of government, you need to acknowledge it is hurting real people who live here. On my street alone, three different households have been affected by the cuts. These are hardworking Americans who could have been making a lot more money in the private sector but chose to take these jobs and make a life here because they saw it as a higher calling. For ideological reasons, you may think that the government shouldn't be spending money on their particular jobs. That's fine. You're entitled to your opinion. But if these kinds of cuts were happening in any other industry in any other city, you would be more likely to spare a thought for the workers. Imagine that a new CEO took over Walmart, the largest private employer in the U.S., with about 1.6 million workers, or about half the size of the federal workforce. Imagine that the CEO immediately began indiscriminately cutting tens of thousands of workers, including truck drivers, sales clerks and janitors, as well as people who handle logistics and accounting and partnerships, with no warning. Stores shuttered overnight; emails turned off without notice; greeters turned away at the door. Not only that, but this CEO's new right-hand man had previously said that he wanted Walmart employees to be 'traumatically affected' and have the public view them as 'villains,' while his chief operating officer took to social media to crow about 'deleting' their jobs. You wouldn't have to shop at Walmart, or even like the store much, to be appalled at the callousness. This moment has been coming for a long time. It started when Ronald Reagan joked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.' It grew when future Speaker Newt Gingrich trained House candidates in the early 1990s to attack incumbents as creatures of Washington at every opportunity. By 2015, even the milquetoast Republican Gov. Scott Walker was vowing to 'wreak havoc on Washington' as though it were the capital of a foreign enemy. By the time Trump was regularly calling federal workers just doing their jobs 'the deep state,' it was already too late. Democrats aren't blameless, either. In a defensive crouch, they failed to defend civil servants when they were regularly tarred as 'bureaucrats.' Sure, Barack Obama had some nice words for federal workers, but he also froze their pay to make a negligible dent in the deficit. Joe Biden rescinded Trump's first attempt to gain control of federal workers and added new protections, but it's now clear that he didn't do nearly enough to shore them up from the threat they now face. And it's not just Washington. More than 80% of federal workers work outside D.C. and are also being fired or having their jobs threatened. They include park rangers, cancer researchers, food safety inspectors, air traffic controllers, veterans' nurses, bird flu experts and nuclear weapons safety specialists. Americans may not like government workers in the abstract, but we are going to notice when these jobs don't get done. The Trump administration may not be done with Washington, either. Republicans in Congress have put together a proposal that would deny D.C. the ability to govern itself, while Trump has said he wants to 'take over' the district. Congress already has the power to review legislation passed by the city council and control over the city budget, and the district already lacks voting representation in Congress. There's literally zero need for this kind of heavy-handed federal control in a city already under lawmakers' thumbs. During the Biden administration, Congress debated the perennial question of whether to grant D.C. statehood. The measure passed the House for the first time in history, but died in the Senate. During debate, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas attacked D.C. as nothing but lobbyists and bureaucrats, offering up Wyoming as an example of a 'well-rounded working-class state' because of its jobs in mining, logging and construction. Rep. Jody Hice argued, inaccurately, that it doesn't have a car dealership. But Washington is so much more than the capital. It's the city that created the half-smoke, Mumbo sauce, the gin rickey and the jumbo slice. Its contributions to music range from Duke Ellington to Marvin Gaye and go-go music to the punk scene that produced Bad Brains and Fugazi. It has amazing Ethiopian restaurants, winding bike paths through Rock Creek Park and great bookstores. To Trump it may be the swamp, but to residents it's the DMV, the District and Chocolate City. As Trump declares war on Washington, it's worth remembering that it's a real place filled with real people, and these attacks are doing real damage to it. This article was originally published on
