Reston's Second Day of Christmas: The Most Clever Christmas Song Parody Since "Grandma Got Run Over By The Silver Line'

Now that Metro's awesome Silver Line has been officially approved by the feds, it's time to celebrate in the true spirit of the holidays: By whining about a four-year-old decision not to build a tunnel through Tysons Corner with a "clever" parody of a Christmas carol.

Community activists against the elevated portion of the Dulles Metro Project have taken to a new type of protesting -- singing an anti-rail rendition of the classic Christmas carol, "Noel."

The organizer of the rally, President of TysonsTunnel.org Scott Monett, also sent a letter to Virginia's House of Transportation and Infrastructure urging the government to suspend plans for an elevated train due to aesthetic and traffic concerns.

Ah, yes, TysonsTunnel.org, the developer-funded grassroots group that penned the clever under-not-over slogan that nearly sunk the Silver Line a while back, all to make sure the the urban beauty of Tysons Corner wouldn't be marred by the smoke from the elevated track fires during their moonlit perambulations between the Olive Garden and Bed-Bath-N-Beyond.

In case you don't feel like clicking through to the video, the song is "No El" -- as in elevated train, get it? -- and then some mumbling, and then something that sounds like "merchants" and "traffic-clogged hell." Merry Christmas!

Weird Al Yankovich called, by the way. He wants his shtick back.

This Week in Crime: Soon we'll have more mugshots than Facebook

So when we first heard about the taxi driver found dead in Tysons Corner on Sunday, we thought that maybe the MASSIVE CRIME WAVE had moved on to other areas. Turns out our criminals are now commuting.

A Crime Solvers tip was instrumental in helping homicide detectives identify the suspect in the murder of Mazhar Nazir. Evan Gargiulo, 22, of 1727 Port Place in Reston (pictured at right) was arrested and charged with one count of murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. Gargiulo turned himself in at the Reston District police station at about 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, November 4.

Wonder if he voted first. Now more details have emerged about Gargiulo, including perhaps the oddest bit of incriminating evidence since C.S.I. Herndon went off the air:

On Tuesday, officers interviewed the anonymous caller and were told that Gargiulo had attended a Halloween party Saturday night wearing a wet suit, neoprene diver's boots and a blond wig.

Police searched Gargiulo's apartment, in the 1700 block of Port Place, on Tuesday afternoon, and found a wet suit and neoprene boots, court records say. Officers also found a 9mm handgun and two magazines for it, the search warrant says. The items were seized for testing.

A systems engineer for Lockheed Martin in Reston, Gargiulo graduated from Penn State this spring, where he coached the school's club swim team. He was also a lieutenant in the National Guard.

Attorney Steven Garver described Gargiulo as "a really nice, good kid" who had not been in any previous trouble.

"It's just a horrible tragedy for everybody involved and their families," Garver said. "I'm sure if everybody could roll back the clocks, it probably wouldn't have happened." He declined to elaborate, saying that "eventually, the facts will come out."

Meanwhile, an arrest has been made in the attempted armed robbery of the Fox Mill Giant in early October. Police are still looking for a second suspect.

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.

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.