Panic: The Drones are Here

Behold this blurry yet terrifying still from a cellular telephone video someone in the Greater Reston-Herndon Area posted to the Face Book Dot Com Online Web Site yesterday: Clearly, the fleets of drones that have terrorized New Jersey managed to recharge their batteries and fly south.

Now, the naysayers and the haters and the Lamestream Media will have you think that this is merely incoming flights lined up for their final approach to Dulles during the busy holiday travel season, or perhaps a constellation, but we know the real, horrifying truth. And there's proof! We were just grabbing our usual sustenance at the McTacoHutPupa complex yesterday and witnessed this shocking scene of destruction:

Clearly, the drones have come for our Chalupa Supremes, leaving nothing but a pile of rubble and a carefully erected construction fence in their wake. And there's more! At considerable legal risk, we falsified our "web logging" income so we could qualify for a Nextdoor Neighbor Dot Com account in our fancypants neighbor to the north, "Great" Falls. Good thing, too, as we discovered this heinous crime:

Not only did the drones get away with a couple of wreaths, but apparently they managed to nab this poster's CAPS LOCK key and vowels as part of their airborne LARCNY. Oh, the humanity!

In conclusion, we hope the RA, or another equally well-armed organization, manages to set up anti-drone batteries around our most important strategic infrastructure to protect us from the Menace from Above, the end. 

I'll Take Brackish Manmade Ponds for $500, Alex

We've written regularly about the teevee show Jeopardy!, in which Restonians have historically held their own. But imagine our surprise when our plastic fantastic planned community was name-checked in an airing of everyone's favorite game show last week. Our favorite correspondent, The Peasant From Less Sought After South Reston, has the "deets," as the kids might have said semi-recently, at least on teevee shows for kids written by octogenarians whose grandchildren would prefer if they stopped offering them caramels, geez:

On tonight's show, one of the categories was "Rough Waters". One of the clues in it was, and I'm paraphrasing here, "White water rescue teams often practice at Great Falls located between Reston and Bethesda on this river." I can understand why for the Maryland side they used Bethesda and not Potomac so as to not give away the answer. But Reston? Maybe they didn't want to repeat "Great Falls" twice?

Whatever the reason, we in Reston can be proud that Manifest Destiny has worked in reverse and we have expanded eastward to annex the swells who live in Great Falls, much to their utter consternation. One can almost imagine the anguished conversations held in hushed tones throughout that once-proud cluster of McMansions. "I say, Biff old chap, do you think the great unwashed in...Reston...would have any Grey Poupon to spare?"

There's historical precedent for annexing the geographic, McMansion-strewn home of our Betters. But sadly, it appears that the promised land north of Rt. 7 will remain free of DRB control (for now), regardless of what everyone's favorite Canadian-American game show host may think.

In the meantime, we'll bask in the national attention and suggest a few additional questions for future episodes:

We'll take Annoying Rhymes for $200, Alex:

This or That for $400:

Not in the form of a question! Too bad, try again:

In the Rough for $600:

Finally, Potent Potables for $800:

You're welcome, Alex. You're welcome.

Reston: The Nexus of Distracted Driving

Is Reston a great place to live, work, play, get involved, and text your "boo," as the kids no longer say, while tooling down Sunrise Valley Drive in your late-model Ford Focus?

Apparently, yes. In a fancy press release about distracted driving, Fairfax County Police listed the top five locations for crashes involving distracted drivers in 2013. All but one were in or around Reston:

• Colvin Run Road/Leesburg Pike
  
• Georgetown Pike/Leesburg Pike
  
• Leesburg Pike/Lewinsville Road
  
• Fairfax County Parkway/Sunrise Valley Drive
  

The fifth location was somewhere in "Franconia," wherever that is. The separatist, often-prickly French-speaking precinct of Fairfax County, maybe?

A couple of takeaways from this. First, watch for the one percenters job creators on their way home to "Great" Falls, as there's a good chance they'll be texting their underlings for updates on various dolphin-related projects. Second, even a structure bedazzled with traffic lights and containing more steel than a battleship isn't enough to keep people from checking their, whazzitcalled, Flappy Birds or whatever, the end.

Reston: Demographics Are Destiny (and Density)

Confidential Restonian Operative "Joel" passed along this fancy website which maps demographics based on U.S. Census Data. Each dot represents a person from the 2010 Census; blue is white, green is black, orange is Hispanic (which strikes us as just a teensy bit racist), and red is Asian. To our eyes, we see a lot of blues and greens living in close proximity, as was The Reston Dream, with greater concentrations of yellows and reds bunched together.

But let's zoom out a bit and look at our neighbors:

Wow. Herndon (at the left) and "Great" Falls (upper right) are definitely two extremes.

Manifest Destiny: RA May Admit Nearby Property, Is 'Great' Falls Next? (No, Probably Not)

Go west east, and slightly north, young man, the RA seemed to be saying as the board voted considered whether to annex admit a home just outside of Reston into the friendly confines of Reston Association goodness, with all the pool passes and whatnot that entails:

Reston Association's Board of Directors will vote Monday to add a property - 11101 Chessington Place, Reston - to the association.

What makes that house so special? It's not the house, its the owner.

RA At-large director Donna Rostant and her husband recently moved from a home within RA boundaries to the $1 million home on Chessington. Since RA by-laws say a director must be an RA member, the solution seems to be to add the home to RA.

RA president Ken Knueven said the Reston deed outlines the process of adding real property to the Association.

A home can be added to RA with the written consent of the homeowner and any holder of a deed of trust and a two-thirds vote of the Board of Directors during a meeting in which a quorum is present.

So many questions… will the RA's newest home now have to be vetted against the DRB criteria for, say, Hickory Cluster, and will it have to be repainted in a fetching shade of asteroid? Will the board attempt to win back its just-departed CEO by annexing his home in Rockville?

Some people aren't happy about this decision, but we say they're just not thinking big. Why fight over the membership status of the future residents of a bunch of midrise dreck when the RA can grow its membership, and make it more exclusive to boot, by looking northward, to 'Great' Falls, or southward to Oakton? As our favorite correspondent, The Peasant from Less Sought After South Reston, points out, how inspiring would it be to see "an island of earth-toned goodness shining as a bright beacon of good taste in a sea of godless communist red mulch"?

Of course, there's one snag. RA's newest house is at least close to the rest of our earth-toned nirvana, but if more far-flung properties are added to its bosom, we'll need to organize a Berlin Airlift-style way of getting vital materials to them. The Peasant thoughtfully compiled this list of RA necessities:

-- Macaroni Grill breadsticks
-- rotary phones for RA pools
-- spare parts for RELAC
-- brown mulch
-- RA election ballots
-- grit for the urban core

We can picture it now:

Inspiring!

And always remember, and never forget, as our BFFs at Patch helpfully point out:

Alternatively, for anyone who resents RA assessments and regulations - there is no streamlined process for leaving the Association.

Exactly.

Flashback Monday: The Outer Beltway That Never Was

In Reston's Ur-creation myth, our bucolic community was supposed to be situated on the east side of a "new outer beltway." Above, you can see the original proposed alignment of the Outer Beltway (large image here), as it was first conceived in the 1950s. Here's the thinking, as detailed in the Roads to the Future site:

Four decades of conceptual planning for a major bypass facility to serve the growth in travel demand forecast for the metropolitan Washington area have preceded the Western Transportation Corridor Study. Such a facility, referred to as "The Cross Country Loop", first appeared in April 1950 on a map prepared by the National Capital Planning Commission and called "Regional Proposals of the Comprehensive Plan".

On the Virginia side, an outer beltway was included in the Northern Virginia Regional Plan for the Year 2000, published in 1966 as the Northern Virginia Development Guide, prepared jointly by the National Capital Regional Planning Council and the National Capital Planning Commission. In addition to an outer beltway, the guide included another circumferential alignment farther out along the general alignments addressed in the Transportation Corridor Study.

The proposal died sometime in the 1980s, but you can see the stretch from Rt. 7 south eventually became Route 7100 Fairfax County Parkway Route 286 (WTF?) (One reason? Check out the proposed alignment north of Rt. 7, which would have run the highway smack through some of the county's fancy high-end housing stock in "Great" Falls, which simply Would Not Do.) Still, it's fun to imagine a giant cloverleaf exchange at Baron Cameron, surrounded on both sides by gas stations and fry pits instead of... well, gas stations and fry pits. Plus a Harris Teeter!

Flashback Monday: Brother Against Brother, Commuter Against Commuter

We've looked at Reston's Civil War past before. But did you know the Battle of Dranesville was fought over a very familiar intersection, where skirmishes between Yankees entitled Great Falls residents and Confederates Loudoun cut-through commuters continue to this day?

Lay it on us, fancy "news paper" article:

In December 1861, a Union Army led by Gen. Edward O. C. Ord encountered Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart’s forces at the intersection of Leesburg Pike and Georgetown Pike. The resulting Battle of Dranesville was one of only a handful that happened in Fairfax County, and it is the subject of the Reston Museum’s next presentation commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Civil War.

The battle, which was fought with five regiments on each side, was fought between Confederates coming from Centreville and Union soldiers coming from Langley.

"The battle was fought because both sides were looking for forage for their horses and they kind of bumped into one another," Waggoner said. "The Confederate soldiers that died were mostly hit by friendly fire, and there were about 150-200 wounded, many of whom probably died later."

Replace "forage for their horses" with "midscale minivans stuffed with imported olives from Wegmans," and things haven't changed all that much in the last 200 years.

The Reston Museum presentation will be at 7 this Thursday.

Oh, the Humanity: Reston Again Snubbed in 'Best Places to Live' List; Apparently Just Not as Awesome as Herndon.... and Manassas Park?

Once again, the listicle-generating fools at Money magazine have snubbed our beloved earth-toned community in its annual list of the best places to live. On the bright side, our Maryland doppelganger Columbia, which was ranked #2 last year, has fallen off the list completely. Maybe a Money factchecker discovered the truth about its satanic past.

However, our tolerant neighbor to the west made the list-- Herndon was ranked 34th. Here's what the Money chart monkeys had to say about the town:

This diverse little town was named for Commander William Lewis Herndon, an American naval explorer, in 1858. Today it provides a great base to explore the many jobs in the area. Herndon sits right near the so-called Dulles Technology Corridor, where companies such as AOL, Microsoft, and Verizon are big employers. Alternatively, residents can make the commute to Washington D.C., 22 miles away. The public schools here are a big draw for many: Newsweek consistently ranks Herndon High in the top 5% of the country. --D.B.

Can we point out that said naval explorer never set foot in the town named for him?

But we're willing to be the bigger persons and let that go. Especially since there's another, far more painful snub on the list. Last year, sprawly cloverleaf intersection Centreville was inexplicably placed on the list. This year, the real head-scratcher is Manassas Park. Not Manassas, Manassas Park, the red-headed stepchild of Manassas proper. Seriously?

In the interest of fairness, let's visit "the MP," as the kids like to say, courtesy of the Google Machine, and see if we're wrong about the place. Here's a lovely picture of the town sign:

Sure looks like a quaint, mom-and-pop sort of place. Now let's turn the Google Street View camera just a little bit to the right to check out the town's bustling business district:

Yep, it's a pawn shop. One of several in the town proper. And in case you want to get a tattoo with the cash you scored by hocking the big-screen TV, you're in luck:

Good times indeed!

And in case you're keeping score at home, "Great" Falls was at the top of the list of "top-earning towns," which, you know, shocker, especially when you consider it's essentially a magnet for government welfare recipients, also known as "contractors," the end.

Our Ursine Overlords Are Coming to Devour Us All, But No Need to Panic

Fairfax County Police said today that the "first seasonal reports of bear sightings" have been made in and around Reston.

Police received the first seasonal reports of bear sightings in 2011 on Thursday, June 9 around 6:30 a.m. near Holly Briar Lane in Great Falls. Callers reported a medium-sized black bear crossing the road near Hollyview Drive, heading toward the woods. Police also received three reports on Friday, June 10 around 6:30 a.m. near Bennington Woods Road, Stowe Road, and a walking trail near Autumn Wood Drive.

According to animal control officers, it is not unusual to see black bears at this time of year and residents should not panic or feel alarmed when they see one.

"But watch out for your pic-i-nic baskets," police did not say, the end.

Road Rules: More Traffic, More Quarters, and 'Great' Falls Gets Its Way, As Usual

This exciting video from the YouTubes captures the sheer excitement of sitting in traffic on Sunset Hills Road while attempting to turn onto Hunter Mill Road and then cross under the Toll Road. There's a point to be made about the design of the intersections and placement of traffic lights, but if watching gridlocked traffic at 5x speed isn't enough to thrill you, just wait until the video shifts to reverse, in 12x speed. Your mind will be blown!

In the meantime, have you noticed that you're paying a quarter more each way for the right to sit in Toll Road traffic and stare at those pylons that will someday bring the Cheesecake Factory Silver Line to Reston? If not, you'll be getting a few nasty $25 surprises in the mail from VDOT sometime really soon. But one intrepid lawmaker is proposing a bill that would require the airport authority to get permission from Fairfax and Loudoun counties before raising rates again. In the meantime, the Toll Road is making what the kids today don't call serious bank for the airports authority, pulling in an estimated $88 million in 2010 -- an increase of 36 percent from the previous year, as only a handful of drivers balked at the earlier round of toll hikes. Money fight!

Of course, all that extra money is going to the awesome Silver Line and its accompanying rad 80s art, which has also just gotten an accelerated infusion of federal funding. Using the feds' projection that the Silver Line will add 10,000 new daily transit riders -- way below original projections -- some snarky columnist pointed out that this works out to $310,000 for each new Metro rider.

Taxpayers would be better off financially giving each of them a brand new Lamborghini Gallardo (MSRP $237,600) or his and hers matching Tesla Roadsters (MSRP $109,000) instead.

Aw hell no, she didn't! Be sure to look for this comment in the upcoming book, A Children's Collection of Transit Funding Snaps, Putdowns, and Practical Bloopers.

And finally, the folks in "Great" Falls who didn't want their pristine McMansions besmirched by smog from Loudoun County cut-through commuters have, not surprisingly, won their many-year battle to prevent VDOT from creating a new turn lane from Rt. 7 to Georgetown Pike. Who knows, maybe they got beloved TV show host Bob Barker to intervene again. Unspecified improvements will still be made on Rt. 7, presumably including an appropriately frightening looking HERE THERE BE DRAGONS sign to keep Loudounites on the straight and narrow and off Georgetown Pike, the end.

This Week in Crime: Death Sentences for '88 Murders, a Fox Mill fire, and the Serial Hamburglar Strikes Again

Alfredo R. Prieto was sentenced to two death sentences for killing a couple in a lot off Hunter Mill Road in 1988.

A Fairfax County jury imposed two death sentences Friday on serial killer Alfredo R. Prieto for the murders of Rachael A. Raver and Warren H. Fulton III near Reston in December 1988.

The jury was told that Prieto, 44, had been sentenced to death for a 1990 rape and murder in California and that he was linked by DNA to a fourth slaying, in Arlington County in May 1988. But jurors were not told that ballistics tests link Prieto to a fifth homicide, in Prince William County in 1989.

Neither did they learn that authorities in California are linking Prieto to four additional slayings there, involving a pair of abductions and double homicides in spring 1990. That would link Prieto to nine killings in slightly more than two years.

This brings to an end proceedings that have run on... let's just say less than speedily since the county's cold case homicide unit linked Prieto to the slayings in 2005, including a mistrial and a ruling from the Virginia Supreme Court. Three times is (apparently) the charm.

Meanwhile, our old new friend the Serial Hamburglar (tm) struck again on November 2, attempting to burgle a half-dozen houses on Riverscape Run in "Great" Falls. It's the first time since October 12th that he is believed to have struck homes in Fairfax County, and this brings to 109 the number of incidents linked to our robbling buddy since August.

A Nov. 1 fire in Fox Mills Estates caused $200,000 in damage to a single-family home. Fire officials say that improperly discarded smoking materials on a screened-in porch on the back of the house caused the fire.

Otherwise, the most exciting thing that's happened in Reston in the past week, according to police, was that an iPhone was stolen from a residence on Bowman Towne Drive. There's not an app for that, but there you go.

This Week in Crime: Police Link Two Reston Bank Robberies; Burgling Meat Salesman Amazingly Not The Fairfax County Hamburgler

What an exciting month in crime! First, we had our serial burglar, and now we have a serial bank robber, who Fairfax County Police believe is responsible for two bank robberies in Reston in the past week, as well as a third in Loudoun County.

Police are investigating two bank robberies that are linked to the same suspect. The first occurred in the Reston area on Thursday, October 21 at the Presidential Bank and the second was at the Capitol One Bank on Tuesday, October 26. Detectives are talking with Loudoun County regarding similarities to a bank robbery in their jurisdiction that occurred on Wednesday, October 6.

The suspect entered the Presidential Bank at 1675 Reston Parkway, implied a weapon and fled with an undisclosed amount of cash. Detectives believe the same suspect robbed the Capitol One Bank at 9883 Georgetown Pike. During this robbery, the suspect pointed a gun at tellers and demanded money. No one was injured and the suspect fled.

In both cases, the suspect was described as a white male in his late 20s. He was 5 feet 7 inches to 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighed approximately 150 to 180 pounds. He wore a black coat, black gloves, and black sunglasses.

Meanwhile, a traveling meat salesmen arrested in connection with a burglary in the Mount Vernon area is not the serial Fairfax County Hamburglar (tm), according to police. That's right, he's not the Hamburglar, even though he is a traveling meat salesman.

Sometimes you just can't make this stuff up.

This Week in Crime: Mailbox Bombs, Burglaries, and Herndon Going to the Birds

What do Reston and some of Baghdad's more earth-toned neighborhoods have in common? Apparently, IEDs. Reston and West Springfield neighborhoods have been the site of at least eight "homemade bombs" since May.

Authorities are warning Fairfax County residents to beware of homemade chemical bombs placed in mailboxes and on front yards of residential areas.

No one has been injured by the bombs, which are made of over-the-counter chemicals, such as Drano and baking soda.

Residents have discovered flaming water bottles upon opening their mailboxes. In June, Lee-Alison Sibley began removing what appeared to be trash from her mailbox in Great Falls. Smoke started barreling out of a plastic water bottle as soon as she touched it.

"The bottle had already exploded, but some of the chemicals burned my finger," Sibley said. "My middle finger turned black and swelled to twice its size."

Fairfax police and fire departments are investigating. "This kind of thing tends to be the work of a younger person," said Renee Stilwell, a fire department spokeswoman. "There's no massive explosion, but it makes people feel threatened . . . and it could be dangerous."

The fire and police departments released a bulletin last month warning residents that "the explosions are powerful enough to damage mailboxes and cause potentially serious harm to persons."

Fortunately, the Paper of Record is there to provide the following insightful comments from its sophisticated readers:

Personally I think it's probably young punks. However, as far as I'm concerned they're terrorists, and if you catch one putting a bomb in your mailbox, they should be fair game, and there should be no penalty for shooting them on sight. Shoot one of them in the stomach with a deer rifle or a .45, and see if they "learn" that what they're doing is serious and not going to be tolerated.

Meanwhile, a 50-year-old woman was injured following a burglary on Park Garden Lane last Tuesday.

Police responded to a burglary in the 1400 block of Park Garden Lane around 11:20 p.m. on Tuesday, July 27. Someone entered the home, assaulted a 50-year-old woman and fled. The victim was taken to a local hospital with non life- threatening injuries. Police continue to investigate.

A Mercedes Benz 320 was also stolen from the 1800 block of Town Center Parkway -- pretty ritzy for a car theft round these here parts. By contrast, in Herndon, someone stole a birdcage from a house.

This and That: A Random Stagger Through Reston News

• On the eve of a fascist "smoking ban" that was put into place in Virginia restaurants earlier this week, a group of protestors decided to have a "four stogie feast" at Morton's in Reston Town Center as a protest, of sorts, setting off the fire alarms in the process.
  
  
• Reston Community Players former president Sue Pinkman was named citizen of the year by the Reston Citizens Association, the first time the award has gone to a leader of an arts group.
  
  
• Democracy was definitely in action when folks from the impoverished village of "Great" Falls slummed it came to Reston to complain about a fancy turn lane on Rt. 7 that would allow more Loudoun County poors to shatter the bucolic beauty of its 7-11 and Safeway:

  More than 150 people, most of them Great Falls residents, showed up for the meeting at Buzz Aldrin Elementary School in Reston, and they were not happy. However, the public comment period on the project closed six years ago, and it was approved in 2004. The purpose of the meeting was simply to explain that additional turn lane was necessary.

  Heh. To be fair, maybe they just want to keep Loudoun's "serial smoocher" away.
  
  
• Oracle is proposing to build a 203,000-square-foot office complex on its property in Reston.
  
  
• A few weeks back, the Washington Post had an interesting feature about 13-year-old Smar Abuagla, a Langston Hughes middle school student who chose to wear a head scarf at school for the first time this year. Was there taunting and the throwing of items at Abuagla, including a zucchini? Oh, yes.
  
  
• Palestinians are looking to build their first planned community. Guess what fancy beige real estate development they picked as a model?

  These communities are patterned after American suburban development -- the new city, Rawabi, is specifically designed for upwardly mobile families of a sort that in the United States might gravitate to places such as Reston, Va. The developments are also relying on another American import, the home mortgage, including creation of a Fannie Mae-style institution for the West Bank.

  Easy mortgages and confounding regulations. What could possibly go wrong?
  
  
• Reston resident Dwayne Phillips, 50, is walking the length of U.S. 11, bit by bit. Last year, he and his wife walked from Reston to Chattanooga, Tenn., and in October he was in Mississippi, hoping to make it the full length of the highway, which ends in New Orleans. Beats sitting on the Toll Road at rush hour, is all we know.

This Week in Crime: Another week, another burglary, plus the athletic bank robber returns?

Just like the previous week, another Reston resident found her apartment burglarized on Friday, this time near Hunters Woods Shopping Center in South Reston:

A 25-year-old woman saw an unidentified man leaving her apartment in the 11000 block of Shire Court on Friday, May 15 around 6:50 a.m. The woman was getting dressed for work in her bedroom, when she saw a shadow walk down the hallway and exit her apartment. She then discovered her wallet, purse and an undisclosed amount of money were missing. There were no injuries.

The suspect wore blue jeans and brown work boots.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Crime Solvers by phone at 1-866-411-TIPS/8477, e-mail at www.fairfaxcrimesolvers.org
or text "TIP187" plus your message to CRIMES/274637 or call Fairfax County Police at 703-691-2131.

Interestingly, someone purporting to be the victim of the previous burglary actually posted her account of the incident elsewhere on this site.

Meanwhile, a bank in "Great" Falls was robbed last week, and we're hoping against hope that it's the athletic but plan-averse bank robber who's the culprit.

A 60-year-old Reston woman working as a bank teller at the Wachovia Bank, 750 Walker Road, was robbed on Friday, May 15 around 10:40 a.m.

A man entered the bank, produced a handgun and demanded money. The victim complied and the suspect fled with an undisclosed amount of money. There were no injuries.

The suspect wore a rubber mask at the time of the robbery. He was described as black, around 5 feet 7 inches tall and between 170 and 180 pounds. He was between 20 and 30 years old.

If it was the same person, there's no word on whether he forgot to bring something to carry the money this time.

This Week in Crime: There Goes the Neighborhood

A Reston woman was the victim of a carjacking on Rt. 7.

A 52-year-old Reston woman was the victim of a carjacking at about 1:15 a.m. on Sept. 27, Fairfax County police said.

The woman was in a parking lot near the intersection of Dranesville Road and Leesburg Pike near Great Falls. She was standing next to her 2004 Toyota Corolla when an unknown man pushed her aside and took her car, police said.

The victim sustained minor injuries. Her car was later discovered abandoned in Washington, D.C., police said.

The suspect was described as Hispanic, in his late 30s, about 5 feet 9 inches tall, with short hair, wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans.

We love how this incident was described as taking place "near" Great Falls. The only crimes that happen there, after all, involve cut-through undesirables and game show hosts.

In Great Falls, the Price is Wrong

You'd think things wouldn't be that different in the sylvan community to our north, "Great" Falls. Separated from Reston by just a few miles and an asteroid belt of giant McMansions on postage-sized lots, the people of that sylvan community are just like you and me. Except when a dispute between neighbors arises, in which case someone gets an aging game show host to come to the rescue.

But John and Carmela Peterson could not have imagined that their effort to save the landscaping outside their Great Falls home would result in all this: a letter from legendary TV game show host Bob Barker, pleading with the state of Virginia to liberate the deer "to tread their little path to the few remaining woods," and a statement by Ingrid Newkirk, founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, stating that there is hardly "anything more selfish, callous and cowardly than shooting a mother deer."

John Peterson was, in the view of some of his neighbors, preparing to kill animals who had as much right to tromp around Great Falls as the people who live on the area's two-acre lots. "None of us are farmers," says Martina Caputy, whose yard is adjacent to Peterson's. "We're not dependent on crops or anything like that. This was a senseless slaughter of the deer."

Caputy is married to Anthony Caputy, chief of neurosurgery at George Washington University Hospital. In 1999, he conducted successful surgery to unblock the carotid artery of Barker, longtime host of "The Price Is Right." So when Martina Caputy heard from the state game warden that "our neighbor had as much right to kill the deer as we have to enjoy them," she decided that she needed extra firepower on her side.

She rang up Barker, long known for lending his celebrity to animal-rights causes. From his California home, Barker dashed off a letter to the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, waxing poetic about how the Great Falls deer "walk along an ancestral path that leads them to and from their sleeping place" and warning that if the state doesn't come on down and stop the hunt, "the children will be catatonic, the neighbors will be up in arms, the fawns will be orphans and the does will be dead" -- all "for the sake of a few flowers."

Wow. That's some purty writing. If we had a similar problem in Reston, the best we could hope for would be beseeching Wink Martindale to write a few off-color limericks.

Affordable Housing in Great Falls Crossing... wait, what?

An odd story in an unexpected place.

A few years ago, Ezzeldin Ezzeldin was contemplating a move to a bigger house. The Ezzeldins owned a house in the Reston neighborhood of Amberlea, in Great Falls Crossing.

Due to a confluence of lost or ignored paperwork and miscommunication, Ezzeldin and about 30 of his neighbors have based their lives around the belief that their houses would revert out from under ADU price controls in 2013, allowing the properties to be sold at market price.

It turns out that Ezzeldin's home, along with many of his neighbors' homes, is still under a control period that stretches until 2047. In almost all the cases, the homeowners would be under the 2013 control period if they or the previous owners of their houses had formally filed to have the covenant changed by a series of deadlines.

Shocking. Unconsciable. Isn't there a law that bars any development with the words "Great" and "Falls" in its name from being affordable?

Reston Road Rules 2: Watch where you park!

Now that there won't be an awesome Metro station whisking Reston residents to the Bed-Bath-N-Beyond in Tysons Tegucigalpa, we should be thankful for the myriad park-and-ride lots and garages in the area, allowing us to live large on those awesome shiny orange-and-yellow buses. Just don't do anything stupid, like park your car in one.

Signs of trouble with the Herndon-Monroe park-and-ride garage surfaced long before the first commuter's car rolled into the $20 million facility off the Dulles Toll Road that Fairfax County opened in 1999.

Fresh cracks appeared last spring and chunks of concrete began falling away, creating safety concerns that prompted officials to fence off about 100 spaces.

A new study found "significant deterioration" in the garage roof because of the poor quality of the concrete. Drains were misplaced and inadequate for dealing with storm runoff. In some spots, water and salt had eaten through the concrete and exposed the reinforcing steel bars to corrosion. The engineering firm, Walker Parking Consultants, also questioned whether the garage had adequate supporting steel to withstand high winds or earthquakes.

The county says the building is safe but needs considerable work.

We think we'll just hitchhike.

Meanwhile, the proposed awesome improvements to Rt. 7, which include a new 29-lane elevated ramp and blinking directional signs ordering half-awake Sterling soccer moms to divert through Great Falls without stopping for coffee at the 7-11 on their way to their soul-numbing clerical jobs in McLean or wherever, have been funded. Well, actually, it's just a turn lane, but you wouldn't know that from what Great Falls residents are saying.

Some residents who live on or near Georgetown Pike appealed to the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority not to add funding to the project, arguing that adding a turn lane and lengthening the existing turn lane will channel more traffic onto the scenic two-lane road that cuts through the center of their community and is already slowed by existing bottlenecks.

"Georgetown Pike is truly an historic road, having under its surface in a number of places the oldest engineered roadbed in this country -- roadbed engineered by George Washington," Eleanor Anderson, a member of the Great Falls Citizens Association's transportation committee, wrote to the authority.

Maybe they should just put up a sign: George Washington Sat in Traffic Here.

Road Rules, Reston style

Lots of awesome news about roads in and around Reston:

First, Rt. 7 will be widened from somewhere beyond Reston Avenue west to Loudoun County. Of course, no public project even tangentially involving Reston (cough cough schools cough cough Metro) can get underway without some nearby, usually overentitled community crying foul. Oakton's currently otherwise occupied, so who's this week's winner? Survey says.... Great Falls!

What is particularly irritating to Great Falls residents is the perception that most of the users of the new turn lanes on Route 7 will be Loudoun County residents using the Georgetown Pike as a cut-through commuter route.

"You are providing cut-through routes for people from Loudoun County," one Great Falls resident said.

"We are here working with facts. We can't say here are 300 people on the Georgetown Pike; let's build an exclusive left-turn lane for them," said Salahshoor.

Funny, we thought being exclusive is what Great Falls is all about. Of course, we can't blame them. If we wanted to sit in traffic surrounded by minivans driven by Sterling soccer moms, we'd go to Costco.

Meanwhile in Reston proper, they've added a stop sign near Lake Anne. But not just any stop sign -- one of them new-fangled three-way stop signs! All thanks to a rumor that a summer car-vs-pedestrian accident at the intersection of North Shore Drive and Village Road almost took out Reston's founder:

In the hours following the accident, rumors swirled that the victim had been 94-year-old Reston founder Robert Simon, himself a resident of Lake Anne and a frequent walker.

Simon was unharmed and out of town and the victim was treated and released from the hospital, but the accident cemented the need for changes at the intersection.

As a result of the outcry from residents and efforts of Supervisor Cathy Hudgins (D-Hunter Mill), VDOT reviewed the intersection and agreed changes should be made.

Simon said he was involved in requests to VDOT for rumble strips in the area even before the accident, which he said probably contributed to the VDOT response.

“It should have because it created a bit of a stir. Actually I nearly was smacked there once, it's a bad place,” he said.

Speaking of bad places, things could always be worse. Here's a woman who took a new job in Reston because it shaved 30 minutes off a commute so bad that a newspaper in Canada wrote about it. No one tell the folks in Great Falls that she uses Rt. 7!