Terribly Exciting News!!!

That's right folks, we've got some exciting news for you. My associate, Robert Pohl, and I will be starting a new walking tour company in the very, very near future focusing on Capitol Hill.

Walking Shtick Tours will provide regularly scheduled walking tours of the Hill, as well as conduct privately scheduled tours on a space available basis.

Those of you who were following me last year may remember the ghost tours we conducted. We'll be giving the Capitol Hill ghost tour again and we've developed a new Scandal Tour of the Hill. Let me just say that researching scandals in close proximity to the Capitol Building was far, far easier than digging up ghosts. If you have a specific area of the Hill or theme you'd like to explore, feel free to contact me with them. We're always looking for new ideas.

We plan to publish our schedule very soon on our website, www.walkingshtick.com, but we'll be offering our Scandal Tour Friday nights and Ghosts on Saturday nights for the month of October. We should be up and running next Friday, the 9th.

And, of course, if you'd like to stay abreast of what we're doing, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Weekly Washington: Same Old, Same Old

photo uploaded to flickr by J-BlueDiscussion continues to swirl around the Constitutionality of Washington, DC's nearly 100 year old tour guide licenseing program. The Institute of Justice's Robert McNamara laid out their position againt licenses in last week's Washington Post's All Opinion's Are Local column, and the Guild of Professional Tour Guide's President Jim Heegeman rebutted in this week's (WaPo Tag Fail: listed under "crime"). Both gentlemen further discussed the issue in person on the Kojo Nnamdi Show. The Washington Post aparently clipped and pasted the Institute of Justice's press releases in writing this Op-Ed, which must have taken as much as thirty minutes to research and write. John Kelly calls the Institute's lawsuit "ridiculously apocalyptic in its descriptions of the dangers of D.C.'s regs, raising the specter of taxi drivers being thrown in jail for pointing out the Washington Monument."

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Way to go, National Park Service!

I'm not in the least reluctant to bash the National Park Service for various ills, so let me be equally quick to praise them when they do something good.

The National Mall, as the 1.8 million folks who strolled by on January 20th might have noticed, could use some work. In addition to nearly half a billion dollars of unfunded maintenance, the Park Service is answering calls for better food options, more restrooms, and generally more amenities. Proposals for upgrading the Mall have been percolating up for some time now. While funding still has to come from that big white building at the east end of the Mall, help is on the way! The latest plans are rolling out and there will be public meetings this week at the Old Post Office on Wednesday, the 11th from 5-7 and Saturday the 14th from 12-2 to discuss the latest. I'll be at the Saturday one and tell you how it went. Feel free to pass along any questions you might be interested and I'll see if I can't get them answered. You can even use the new Twitter feed!

And this weekend we had a more immediate sign of improvement. The Park Service has announced they are replacing all the signs on the Mall. But if things are clearly marked and correspond to the maps, how will we spot the tourists? Part of the reason I started this blog was to help the poor guy looking at the map, then at the sign, then at the map, and wondering how they could possibly be reconciled. If he could just follow the well marked signs, what am I going to do?

Way to go, NPS. Take all the fun out of it.

Twitter Feed

Emboldened by my amazing technical prowess of actually setting up a Facebook page for DC Like a Local, I've added yet another way to keep track of us.

We now have a Twitter feed. Very exciting times we live in.