What is Mauve? Reston Man Wins Second Night on Jeopardy

Reston's own Dan Jensen won for a second day on Jeopardy, reports our favorite correspondent, The Peasant From Less Sought After South Reston:

Dan the man does it again! After a seesaw struggle in both rounds, he enters Final Jeopardy with a $2,000 lead over his nearest rival. All three contestants correctly answer that of all countries where Spanish is the official language, Venezuela is the last alphabetically. Dan cannot be caught and ends the day with $19,201 in winnings, bringing his two-day total to an impressive $40,202. Viva Danilo!

And he wasn't even wearing a lucky russet brown shirt...rather something blue-gray in tone.

Fingers crossed for another victory--and a DRB-approved wardrobe choice--on Day 3.

We'll Take Earth Tones for $100: Reston Man Wins Big on Jeopardy

And we thought this was a slow news week! Our favorite correspondent, the Peasant from Less Sought After South Reston, weighs in with an exciting scoop, straight from his living room:

In a continuing quest to fill his brain with all sorts of esoteric and at times useless knowledge (beyond that gleaned from reading certain "official" websites run by professional journalists and/or homeowners associations), The Peasant sprawled out this evening to watch "Jeopardy". Imagine the surprise to find that one of the two new contestants on tonight's show was a Mr. Dan Jensen who comes from none other than Reston, Virginia. His occupation is restaurant manager; one could only hope against hope that he oversees the all-you-can-eat breadsticks and pasta at The Macaroni Grill.

In the first round, our native son proves to have pretty broad knowledge and a lightning fast finger on the answering device (although not fast enough, ironically, to ring in with the answer about the design on the Virginia state quarter). He does nevertheless earn $1,500 on that round's daily double with the correct answer of "The Reign of Terror". No, the question wasn't about those RA Covenants dudes with clipboards terrorizing hapless homeowners who own oversized compost bins, but rather that "off with their heads" chapter in the recent RA Board of Directors election -- strike that -- revolutionary France. Our man Dan ends the first round in the lead with $9,300.

Different story in the second round, as reigning champ Steve comes on strong in both the art and physics categories; we are guessing that Dan snoozed through art appreciation class at South Lakes and that his Mr. Plutonium Cold Fusion in a DeLorean project did not win first prize at the Fairfax County Science Fair. Steve takes the lead, but then in a John Edwards series of moments self-destructs with several big-buck wrong answers. The second round ends in a cliffhanger with Dan at $11,300, $700 more than fellow contestant Maureen and $900 more than Steve.

It all comes down to Final Jeopardy in the category "worldwide media". For a nanosecond we harbor the hope that the correct answer to the upcoming question will be "Restonian World Headquarters", but no, that sneaky Alex Trebek asks about some mainstream/lamestream "news agency whose name means peninsula as in the Arabian Peninsula". Everybody get the obvious correct answer of al-Jazeera, but our man Dan bets big with a wager of $9,701, giving him the championship, a one-day total of $21,001, and the chance to play again. Lucky guy -- that's enough money to pay at least another 35 years of RA annual assessments, or a week's worth of expected Dulles Toll Road fares in the year 2018.

And finally, while Dan is obviously a bright guy, we believe a significant part of his success tonight is due to the fact that he was wearing his lucky shirt that was, of course...mauve.

We wish Dan the best of luck as he moves on to the next round... tonight? We haven't watched Jeopardy in a while, opting instead for more sophisticated fare, but maybe it's tonight. We only hope he chooses a russet brown shirt for Day 2.

You can watch a brief "hometown howdy" from Jensen here, or at least you could if you had an Internet connection faster than a 300 baud modem.

Wiehle Park and Ride Closure Scheduled For Spring Delayed Until... Spring, and What $1.46 Million Gets You in Parking These Days

Fairfax Connector announced yesterday that the Reston East park and ride lot on Wiehle Avenue will close completely sometime in "Spring 2011," as work begins on the awesome three-car multilevel parking garage for the Wiehle Avenue Metro station. The lot was initially scheduled to close completely by Feb. 27, but the contractors working on the sadly rectangular garage apparently haven't found enough of those orange cones with the blinking lights on top, so they're going to have to stand around somewhere else for a while, maybe install a fanciful bollard or two, etc., until they come in from the manufacturer, but they'll give us a call just as soon as they do, and hey, whaddya want them to do, drive to the bollard factory and fabricate them themselves? Ah, contractors. Right?

Anyhoo, several bus routes have already been shifted to the Reston North lot, which isn't actually in North Reston, in anticipation of the closure, and last month the Board of Supervisors formally approved a lease agreement with Boston Properties that will transform a parcel of property on Sunset Hills Road just south of the Fake Downtown gritty urban core from a vacant parking lot into an interim parking lot, all for the low low price of $1.46 million. That seems pretty steep to fix up and rent a surface parking lot that will be used for a couple of years and then torn down to build a Cheesecake Factory or something, but when you realize that $45,000 of that is allocated to electrical costs, it starts to look like a bargain.

This is what $1.46 million gets you these days, in case you were wondering.

A public meeting will be held to discuss the closure at 7pm Feb. 2, at the North County Government Center.

Guess the Mauve Bits Pt. 7: Earth-Toned Escher

Nothing says "slow news week" quite like our ongoing un-contest of mystery easy to identify photos of Reston taken by roving Predator drones the Google machine. We're pretty sure we had a poster of this building up in our dorm room in college, but we wouldn't have guessed in a million years we'd be living near it someday!

As always, make your guess in the comments for your crack at not winning that late-model Buick we keep prattling on about. For those keeping score at home, the over/under on this one should be about 11 minutes.

Update: We have a winner, and it took just seven minutes -- which is a lot less time than it would take to figure out how to get to the top of this twisted triangle of a parking garage.

On the Twitter Machine: Reston Resolutions, Tech Tears, and TMI

It's been a month or so since we walked down to the basement of Restonian World Headquarters with a flashlight to check on the Twitter machine (which we had installed at great expense next to the hot water heater). Apparently it needs a new filter! Oh, wait -- that was the furnace. But what are the krazy kids on Twitter talking about? Pretty much the same old same old:

Now there's a resolution we can heartily agree with! Is there a Macaroni Grill in Centreville?

Wow. Just wow. Though "Tech Tears" would be a pretty good name for a Devo cover band.

Yikes. Way way WAY TMI, as the kids today don't say.

We think there's a metaphor in there or something. We were asleep that day in English.

We smell a lawsuit!

Maybe they were laughing because a GIANT RESTON SIGN was trying to talk to them.

Wait a minute. There are people under 25 in Reston?

Maybe -- but if you're going to buy, we've got some awesome midscale retail to "get your buying on," as the kids today still don't say.

Magic 8-Ball says: Doubtful.

Sounds awesome! Oh, wait -- that's what we're already doing. Minus the $500-1,000 a month, anyway.

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.

Meanwhile, in the Anti-Reston: Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

We've written quite a bit of late how reliably tolerant Herndon has had a bit of a thaw in recent months, as frightened town residents confront the specter of tall buildings and whatnot. They're not even quite as vulgar anymore! So how did our tolerant neighbor to the west ring in the New Year? With Fairfax County's first gay bar, that's how!

So Addictive, which started out as a coffeehouse (thus the name), launched a weekly gay night last summer - a Wednesday gathering that initially consisted of four people, including Jennings and his boyfriend, drinking beer, watching "Modern Family" at the bar and wondering where everybody else was.

Now, the Wednesday night drag shows - featuring a wild mix of makeup, wigs, spangles and Lady Gaga impersonations - fill the place. Their success has persuaded Jennings and So Addictive's owner to swap out the bar's weekly hip-hop and Latin nights and turn their place into the only almost full-time gay bar in Fairfax County, home to more than 1 million people. The new format took effect on New Year's Eve; the only straight holdover on the schedule, for now, is heavy-metal Monday.

It wouldn't be Herndon if there wasn't a heavy metal Monday, after all. But this is a big deal, right?

The arrival of a gay bar in the heart of a quintessentially suburban community nearly 25 miles outside of Washington is a milestone for the gay community. It's also a broader test to see whether a business that caters to gay men and lesbians can succeed and gain mainstream acceptance in a town that was once featured in a book on the 100 "Best Places to Raise Your Family" in the United States.

By flying a rainbow flag directly across from the old Herndon Town Hall on Elden Street, So Addictive already has become a key marker in the gay diaspora. Sarah Gustafson, president of the gay rights organization Equality Fairfax, recently e-mailed the 900 people on her list to announce the "fantastic news" that "yes, Virginia, there is a gay bar in Fairfax County."

Frankly, we would have expected such a place to come to Reston light years before Herndon. Hell, we would have expected such a place in Clifton before Herndon. And in the interest of equal time, there's also this. So everyone's happy, right?

So Addictive's transformation into a full-fledged gay bar has turned at least some heads in Herndon. At Horn Motors, an auto parts store one block down Elden, an employee who answered the phone Friday said of his neighbor: "I don't think you want to print what I got to say."

The general manager, Wayne P., declined to give his last name and wondered whether he should say anything at all, "because anymore you have to be politically correct." Then, he said: "I'm not going to degrade them in any way, shape or form. But I'll be honest with you, I don't believe in that type of lifestyle. But it's not affecting me or my business at all. As long as they keep it orderly, I don't have a problem with it. Hopefully, they work on it and take care of their business and good for them."

"They." "Them." Wonder who else those words have been used to describe in Herndon?

Others are more enthusiastic.

Jimmy Cirrito, the owner of Jimmy's Old Town Tavern, said he welcomed the gayification of So Addictive, which is across the street from his bar. "If somebody's against having a gay bar, then they're against America," he said. "It's freedom. We're all God's people. We do what we want."

Only in Herndon can the guy who runs the place with the pyromaniac bartenders make the most sense.