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If you want to make your bottle of shampoo last a little longer while still improving your hair's health, all you need is a pack of gelatin. More »

When are women’s “problems” really problems? According to the vintage ads I’ve collected below, only when they affect a man.

You gals may want to pay special attention to that delicate female problem that has destroyed so many marriages. And no, despite the headline for the ad below, I’m not talking about poor spelling.

And yes, that really was an ad for Lysol. The good folks at Lysol hoped to get women so worried about the effect of their “one neglect” on the men in their lives that they would actually put Lysol in their vaginas. Evidently this ad campaign proved successful; there are a lot of these old Lysol ads floating around. Like this one:

Lysol wasn’t the only brand hoping that women would blame their allegedly smelly vaginas for any problems in their marriages:

And speaking of that whole lady area down there, meet this fellow:

Once you’ve got all your female troubles under control, there’s a simple way to win men back:

The only question is if he’s ready for this jelly.

EDITED TO ADD: Here’s one more! It does not involve the lady regions, however.

"And here I am today at Howard, a historically black college. Here I am, a guy who once presumed to discuss a section of the Civil Rights Act. Some have said that I’m either brave or crazy to be here today. I’ve never been one to watch the world go by without participating. I wake up each day hoping to make a difference. I take to heart the words of Toni Morrison of Howard University, who wrote: 'If there is a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.'"
—If you've been waiting for the sketch comedy bit where Rand Paul gives a hilarious speech at Howard University, today's your day.

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Taking on a DIY project often means that, unlike building furniture from IKEA, you won't have the nuts and bolts that you'll need set aside and packaged for you. To that end, the folks at Bolt Depot have put together a handy cheat sheet that you can use as field guide to fasteners. More »

Using trees that have naturally fallen, one artist's striking work invites a closer look at one of England's most infamous witch trials.

This vegan version of the favorite quick bread is about as healthy as you'll find for this delicious, moist, banana-flavored treat.

One quaint village in India has adopted a wonderfully eco-conscious tradition that is actually helping to ensure a greener future with each new generation.

2440 18th Street, NW

From the owner:

Before it was Adams Morgan, the 18th St and Columbia Road NW area was home for many well-known clubs including the famous Showboat, where top entertainment performed. Many well known businesses got their start on 18th street : The first Toys R Us, the first Peoples Drug and Dart Drug Stores and Gartenhaus Furs.

Al Shapiro spent much of his time in the neighborhood and was a regular at one of the local 18th restaurants called Ballance’s Columbian Restaurant, nicknamed Bobbies. Once he learned his favorite restaurant was for sale, he jumped on it, and renamed it Millie and Al’s. Millie was Al’s girlfriend who bartended and had a great steady following.

In 60’s patrons could fill the bar from 8:30 am til the wee hours bringing a new meaning to the word, Regulars. Many sat at the bar the same time everyday and the only way they gave up their permanent bar stool was after passing away.

In the early days of Millie and Al’s, a group from the neighborhood car dealership came in everyday after work and sat at the same booth. The manager, who was part of this group died and as a Memorial gesture they brought the horse picture from his office in and placed it above their booth in his honor. Soon after the managers death, a new manager was assigned the position in the same office. He learned of the picture being moved from the office and went to Al to request that the picture be returned. There was no doing by Al, the boys brought it in honor of their friend, who died, and it would remain there . This picture still remains in the same place and has never been damaged or tampered with.

Al existed through so many neighborhood transitions, including some really bad times. Not many would have endured these changes and stayed. This area once had the nickname “Little Harlem”. You could not walk the sidewalks as a pedestrian without fear. Not long after the riots a little Havana was born with crime to match. These were ruff gangsters that could drink until they were blinded. If it was last call and the bar was closing, Al would describe these guys not wanting to leave a drop of beer, so they would chug the remains until it would seem to come out of their ears.

Al was not a very tall or bulky man, but many watched him literally jump up to hit or throw one of these gangster or punks out. They did not resist, whether it was respect or fear, but Al won. He never really boasted in this victory; it was Al defending his turf.

There were riots, gangsters, thugs, and then suddenly there were Yuppies. All the bad` paid off for the good times in Adams Morgan. Soon to explode to an area not duplicated or matched, diversity all the way.

As the neighborhood progressed less violence was occurring and the various cultures were uniting, thus Adams Morgan Day was born. A yearly event that has continued for over 35 years.

2013 marks the 50th year for Millie and Als, a true landmark to Adams Morgan.

The arrival of Yuppie era started a wave of restaurants, bars, and businesses to open so rapid that a Moratorium to new liquor licenses started. Millie and Al’s once a lone bar in a neighborhood with few other businesses was now surrounded by bars, restaurants and clubs. Competition or not, MA maintained its business and it increased its loyal Regulars.

The crowds grew as well as the bathroom lines. More and more couples hooked up and many getting married. There is a large unknown amount of couples that owe their partnership to MA’s: A traveling couple in China bumped into another couple wearing a MA t-shirt and reminisced over meeting at MA.

A young couple on a motorcycle stopped to help a woman with a flat tire on a hot summer day in Minneapolis. Conversation revealed that the couple met at MA and were visiting Minneapolis to announce their engagement to their parents and the misfortunate woman with flat was best friends with the owner of MA.

A couple visiting opening day at a new restaurant were introduced to the owners when they realized they all met at MA’s. Chances are someone you know met their spouse or partner at MA’s, as one of their t-shirts quotes “I met Your Mother at Millie & Al’s”.

Millie and Al’s in the early 70s courtesy of owner Barbara Shapiro

Exercise!

Nearly half of all voters are so dumb they'll completely change their strongly held political beliefs if you give them a piece of paper with opposite beliefs, researchers have discovered. Even the youngest wizards and witches can perform such simple magic, meaning that all future elections will be decided by our oldest and still most believable religious system: magic.

To get people to reverse their opinions, crafty researchers had the test subjects fill out a survey about an upcoming election. After the dummies finished their forms, the researchers used "sleight of hand" to return a form with the opposite answers selected. "92% of the study participants accepted the manipulated summary score as their own," the journal Nature reports.

On the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time.

Sweden? Yes. Unfortunately, this research was done in Sweden instead of America, where the strongest partisans are often tragically unable to articulate their own beliefs or fill out a simple form.

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Sounds like a fun event for kids and families! The Girard Children's Community Garden, where kids can attend workshops to learn about plants and gardening, is having a workday and celebration this Saturday at the garden.
It's a neat project, and here's more information.

On a mild April night some years ago, I walked past a college dorm in New Haven and smelled something I couldn’t place. It reminded me vaguely of swimming pools. Was it chlorine? I sniffed again, more deeply than before. Suddenly I knew exactly what it was and hurried away, internally berating an unseen teenage boy. A few evenings later, in the same spot, I smelled it again. Filled with a sense of moral outrage I looked around, I looked up, and identified the culprit: A tree.

More precisely, a Callery Pear, or Pyrus calleryana, a deciduous tree that’s common throughout North America. It blossoms in early spring and produces beautiful, five-petaled white flowers—that smell like semen.

Like when you learn a new word and then see and hear it everywhere, after making the connection between Callerys and the scent of semen I saw and smelled them everywhere. I said that Callerys are "common": A preposterous understatement. In Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, which is for horticulturists what the DSM is for psychotherapists, Michael Dirr says that the Bradford Pear—a Callery cultivar—inhabits "almost every city and town to some degree or another" and warns that "the tree has reached epidemic proportions." There's one between my apartment and my favorite coffee shop in Brooklyn, and there’s probably one between your apartment and your favorite coffee shop. The last time New York’s Parks Department conducted a tree census, from 2005 to 2006, there were 63,600 Callery Pears, making it the third-most popular species in the city, after the London Planetree and the Norway Maple.

The Callery's aroma is an open secret. Three years ago The Frisky published an article titled "A Tree That Smells Like…Well…Um…," which directed me to a Yahoo! Answers thread on the topic, and to the Urban Dictionary entry "Semen Tree."

But in the professional literature, euphemisms abound. Dirr calls the Bradford "malodorous" and leaves it at that. (By contrast, here’s how he describes the Bradford’s fall coloration: "spectacular reddish purple, others yellow to red reminding of a persimmon orange.")

The way I see it, there’s weirdly little attention paid to the fact that, for a few weeks each year, there’s a good chance your street smells like semen. We just carry on as if that were normal.

The Callery’s not even the most-talked-about smelly tree, a distinction that certainly belongs to the vomit-perfumed Ginkgo. There’s even a New Yorker Talk of the Town about the Ginkgo’s stench—and the three media-savvy teenagers who formed an Anti-Gingko Tolerance Group. But the Callery? The New Yorker doesn’t care. There is no Anti-Callery Tolerance Group.

Despite the absence of grassroots agitating against the Callery, we may have reached peak semen-smell. As Dirr puts it, Bradfords tend to "develop rather tight crotches," which makes them prone to splitting as they age. And while not every Callery cultivar splits easily—the Aristocrat and the Chanticleer fare better—they’re all borderline invasive, taking up shop in abandoned lots without human intervention. (And less urban ecosystems as well: A National Parks Service publication explains how to cut them down and apply herbicides to the stumps.) For these reasons—not because of their smell—they’re falling out of vogue with urban parks departments.

New York now plants just 20 or 30 Callerys per year, while literally thousands are lost to attrition (from storm damage and such). Jeremy Barrick, the deputy chief of forestry, horticulture and natural resources at the Parks Department, expects the Callery to lose its number 3 spot in the 2015 census. He anticipates a total Callery count of roughly 30,000—a 50-percent decline from 2006.

That’s progress. But for the time being, you can tell it’s spring if you smell semen.

Juliet Lapidos is an editor at the New York Times. Photo by Bosc d'Anjou.

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Photo of Second and L Streets, NE via NoMa BID

From a press release:

Mark your calendars now for NoMa Summer Screen, the neighborhood’s most anticipated event of the year, with 13 weeks of OUTLAW HERO films! Now in its sixth year, the award-winning outdoor film series will feature classic American westerns, space invasion thrillers, 80’s comedies, and more.

NoMa Summer Screen is a free, 13-week outdoor film series in NoMa, Washington, D.C.’s fastest growing neighborhood. Every Wednesday from May 22 to August 21, hundreds of neighbors gather at 7 p.m. for music, giveaways, food trucks, picnicking, and fun for the whole family. Films start at dark. All movies are screened with subtitles. Coolers, children and friendly (leashed) dogs are welcome.

Outlaw Heroes:

May 22: Indiana Jones: Last Crusade
May 29: Star Trek (The Future Begins, 2009)
June 5: The Princess Bride
June 12: The Italian Job (2003)
June 19: Goonies
June 26: Breakfast Club
July 3: The Fugitive
July 10: Bridesmaids
July 17: Moonrise Kingdom
July 24: True Grit
July 31: Hunger Games
August 7: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
August 14: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
August 21: Rain Date

Family Film Night at Sursum Corda schedule after the jump.

Now in its third year, the NoMa BID will also sponsor Family Film Night at Sursum Corda, where families and children gather for free family-centric movies (also fitting the ‘Outlaw Hero’ theme) and free food. Family Film Night will take place on four Tuesdays this summer:

June 18: How to Train Your Dragon
July 9: Brave
July 23: The Incredibles
August 6 (in conjunction with National Night Out): Toy Story 3

The event starts at 7 p.m. with kid-centric activities and free food. Films start at dark.

Comedian and impressionist Dave Coulier will be returning to Arlington for three comedy shows next week.

Coulier is perhaps best known for playing “Uncle” Joey Gladstone on the ABC series Full House in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Other entertainment credits include hosting the show America’s Funniest People, and providing voiceovers for the animated series The Real Ghostbusters. Coulier is also widely believed to the the subject of the Alanis Morissette Song “You Oughta Know.”

Coulier will be performing stand-up comedy at Artisphere in Rosslyn (1101 Wilson Blvd) on Saturday, April 20. He will perform two shows, at 7:30 and 10:00 p.m. Tickets to each are $30.

The Michigan native will also be performing at a comedy, improv and illusion variety show at Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse (2903 Columbia Pike) on Thursday, April 18, at 7:30 p.m. Coulier will share the stage with a master illusionist and the Porkchop Volcano improv troupe at the family-friendly (PG rated) show. Tickets are $25 and will benefit Patrick Henry Elementary School.

We last reported on Coulier when he performed at Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse in 2011.

Chez Billy located at 3815 Georgia Avenue, NW

Thanks to @russellbreck for tweeting the link to @PoPville. The Travel Channel writes:

“Influenced by its residents’ eclectic mix of cultures, DC offers up some of the nation’s most inspired and diverse restaurants.”

Their top five are:

Chez Billy located at 3815 Georgia Avenue, NW in Petworth.

RANGE located at 5335 Wisconsin Avenue, NW in Friendship Heights.

Izakaya Seki located at 1117 V Street, NW in U Street.

Fiola located at 601 Pennsylvania Ave, NW in Penn Quarter near the Navy Archives metro.

Mintwood Place located at 1813 Columbia Rd, NW in Adams Morgan.

Serial entrepreneur millionaire Jason Calacanis is joining the crowd of rich people in turning against college: "In my estimation college is worth it if you have a ton of money and don’t care about ROI, or if you can pay less than $50k-$75k and get a job with starting pay of $50k or more (generally technical, trade or finance work)." Don't go to school, kids!

But there's an answer. And the answer comes from brave disruptors in tech! That's where all good answers come from. "They’re blowing up education by making it a) free, b) on demand and c) engaging—and even fun!" Yessir. "Did you know you can take tons of courses from MIT, Stanford and Harvard online right now for free?"

In fact I did know that.

So, a bunch of millionaires don't want to pay outrageous college prices. Good for them! The price of college is insane. But back in the real world, 64 of the best colleges in the country meet 100% of student need, so that children from families that aren't millionaires can attend an actual school, instead of a series of YouTube webinars, at a cost approaching zero dollars. Hundreds of other schools come close to meeting 100%, or do and don't guarantee it. But we're not talking about the vast majority of students. We're talking about millionaires who don't need to bother filling out financial aid forms. We're talking about folks like Sebastian Thrun, who brought you Google Street View, so he must be an expert on higher education.

Enjoy your well-rounded and trust-funded children who watch a bunch of college videos and get a certificate that they did so! They're going to be a real boon to the world.

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"Brisk walking reduces the risk of heart disease more effectively than running when the energy expenditure of both activities is balanced out, a study has found. Running reduced the risk of heart disease by 4.5% while walking reduced it by 9.3%. Calorie for calorie, walking also had a stronger impact on heart disease risk factors. The risk of first-time high blood pressure was reduced by 4.2% by running and 7.2% by walking."
—Taking a nice, brisk walk is better for you than running! It even reduces your high cholesterol more than running. Best of all, you don't have to run around sweating and huffing like an idiot, wearing those ridiculous clothes. Just have a nice walk, every day!

Photo by Christopher Edwin Nuzzaco.

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I had the pleasure of speaking to a great class at AU last week. One of the students asked if we had ever done a piece about Mad Hatter on Connecticut Ave. We haven’t yet, so this one is for you, Blaire. (By the way, Blaire told me her parents named her after the Blair House … and added an ‘e’ at the end  of her name.)

Let’s dig into a little history for the building at 1319 Connecticut Ave. NW.

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The Antiques Dealer

Mrs. Julia D’Wald Cordley was a dealer in rare antiques, having moved to Washington in the  1920s from New York with her husband Frank. She was originally from Ohio, born in 1873 as the child of a Polish immigrant father and German mother.

She ran a prominent antiques business, initially out of 812 17th St. NW, but then moved to the space currently occupied by Mad Hatter, for close to a decade. The old Washington Post newspapers were rife with ads for her period furniture, silver, and rugs.

Mad Hatter needs to create a speciality cocktails calls Mrs. Cordley. What do you think?

Mrs. Cordley’s antiques store – May 5th, 1930

Mrs. Cordley’s retirement advertisement – April 20th, 1937

Interestingly, we dug up a few more advertisements for Mrs. Cordley through 1939. Her retirement sale went on for about two years!

Curved Eloquence

A few years after World War II, the building was occupied by The Jenny Shoppe,  a ladies fashion store. Below is an advertisement from the Washington Post which ran on leap day, 1948.

The Jenny Shoppe – February 29th, 1948

The store wasn’t there much longer. By the following summer, it had been replaced by Davanne Millinery, a high-end hat shop for women.

Wash and Wear Wigs

Need a wig? If you did in 1970, you would have stopped by Wig Fair to pick the “The Juliette,” a wash and wear stretch wig. Sounds like a name for one more Mad Hatter cocktail.

Here’s an advertisement from the Washington Post, published on Friday, August 21st, 1970.

Wig Far – August, 21st, 1970

Jewelry Holdup

After serving time as the home of wigs, a new tenant moved in. Cornelius Zwennes moved his store from Georgetown to Dupont Circle and in 1973, his store was targeted in a holdup. Below is the Washington Post article from May 10th, 1973, detailing the crime.

Since teeny boppers and other street people had become a Georgetown fixture, jeweler Corenlis [sic] Zwennes decided after 20 years there that Connecticut Avenue was “a better place for high grade merchandise.”

Yesterday after his one-year-old shop at 1319 Connecticut Ave. NW was the target of an attempted robbery, Zwennes said he was “not so sure anymore.”

The incident occurred around 4:30 p.m. Tuesday and Zwennes captured the accused robber, identified by police as John Willie Adams, 25, of 3200 16th St. NW. Police said Adams was on parole from a 10-year sentence he received in July, 1968, for burglary and grand larceny.

Zwennes was prepared. He had a burglar alarm system, unused since the shop opened in April, 1972. He also had a pistol, acquired three weeks ago, after another jewelry store five doors away was robbed.

Zwennes was out of sight in his mezzanine workshop, setting a diamond in a pin. His wife, Christine, was downstairs waiting on a man who was carefully scrutinizing a ring.

“I like it a lot, I’m going to take it,” Zwennes said he heard the man say.

The man then allegedly put a hand in his pocket, shoved the pocket towards Mrs. Zwennes, as if he had a gun, and said, “Now don’t make a move because this is a holdup.”

Zwennes overheard the remark, pressed the alarm system and came down the steps, pistol in hand. “When he saw me coming down the stairs with my gun, he sneaked out the door and tried to mix with the (rush hour) crowd,” the jeweler said. “I followed him, crept up behind him, put the gun in the center of his back, and in about a minute the police arrived.”

As the man left the store, Mrs. Zwennes snatched the ring from his hand. Police who searched Adams said they found no gun. Adams was charged with robbery.

Hello Handsome!

By the 1980s, the spot was where Nickleby’s set up shop.

Nickleby’s – 1983 ad

The post If Walls Could Talk: Mad Hatter appeared first on Ghosts of DC.

Contrary to popular belief, spirits don't necessarily get better with age. Like wines, they can peak at a certain time, then slowly decline in quality thereafter. More »

This little indoor gardening project might mean never having to buy celery again. Turn the base end of a bunch of celery (which you'd normally throw out or compost) into a celery plant, for an everlasting supply of the vegetable. More »

Until recently, China's government estimated that there were over 50,000 rivers and waterways with catchment areas of at least 100 square kilometers.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has 4 new graduates that will make life harder for wildlife smugglers.

Medicine cabinets are a great place to store all the various bottles, tubes, boxes and packs one needs in a bathroom. They're also small and cramped. Lifehack.org suggests saving some space by attaching magnets or adhesive hooks to the inside of the door and hanging some of your items on them. More »

You have heard and read by now about the rather terrible impact of sitting all day. You also know that meetings involve lots of sitting, and are often terrible. Kill two birds with one stone, and extend your life, by taking every walking meeting you can. More »

Just when you thought the Jim Graham influence peddling/quid pro quo scandal was over, it's back.

If you recall (and it's kind of confusing) Ward 1 councilmember Graham allegedly agreed to support a developer's employee's bid for the DC lottery contract if that developer dropped a bid for a Metro property on Florida Avenue NW. The reasons for doing this are unclear, but it may be because he was opposed to the developer, Sinclair Skinner, who was allegedly behind homophobic and racist signs aimed at Graham after Graham shut down a club in the Reeves Center that had some violent incidents.

Anyway, after this latest scandal, Graham was reprimanded by the council and lost a committee chairmanship, but no charges were filed.

Now that development company, Banneker Ventures, is suing Graham, the city, and another developer who Graham allegedly was helping for $100 million. Yes, million.

Graham says the suit is meritless and Banneker lost because they didn't do a good job: "Although audacious given their dismal performance and demonstrated pattern of nonfeasance, Banneker's claims are spurious and wholly unfounded. I look forward to an early dismissal."

The suit unveiled some juicy and amusing details. For one, the suit claims Graham would only meet with people from Banneker if they agreed to go to his favorite restaurant, Ten Penh. That's pretty funny. Less funny though are allegations that Graham said they first should donate $40,000 to the U Street BID, which he got up and running, before he would help them, and that they should hold a fundraiser for his campaign. If true, those are pretty serious allegations.

Photo by Mr. T in DC

This vegan dish with its complex, rich flavor is full of protein and nutrients, and goes great with gluten-free pastas.

Lifehacker reader JonesyVan's workspace looks like your typical cubicle. Hidden in the filing cabinet, however, is some serious entertainment for break times (i.e., "when Bossman decides to exit his office"): a wall-mounted TV and Xbox 360. More »