Dry

 In the early 1980s, when I ran a lot, I knew all the water fountains along Rock Creek from Peirce Mill to above Knowles Avenue in Kensington. During the months that they were working, I suppose May through September, I often stopped to drink.

By the time we moved into the District in 2004, and I started to run often in Rock Creek Park again, I no longer ran distances that called for water stops. I did see a fair number of runners with water supplies--"camelbacks" or belts with half-pint bottles. This amused me, for I thought that at least in the warm months they could have spared the weight, and drunk from the public fountains.

Then this past weekend, I found myself very thirsty while running. On Saturday, I stopped at the water fountains at picnic groves 10 and 6, and found that they produced just a little dribble of water. One can, given time, fill up a water bottle from the fountain, for I saw some young women doing so. But one can't conveniently drink. I may look into the status of other fountains, but if so I will wait until the weather is cooler and I am not very thirsty.

You Rock, Alfred!

 One afternoon last week, I was sitting in one of my preferred seats on the S2 bus, facing across the aisle in the back. I was reading Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality with a pen in my right hand, and probably jotting more question marks than brackets or underlines. The book makes for very slow reading, for me.

About Irving Street, a man who had been sitting on far back seat stood up to leave. He asked me what I was reading, and I turned the book over so that he could see the cover. He smiled in approval, and held out a fist, which after a second's confusion I bumped with my own.

 I have been riding the 16th Street buses regularly for seventeen years now, and in that time probably fewer than ten persons have remarked on anything I was reading. A few have expressed approval, but this is the first who offered a fist bump.

Still Another Giddy Measure

 Still another giddy measure came before the House in the course of the session [the first of the Sixth Congress], the Ross Election Bill for a "Grand Committee" of House and Senate to pass upon the validity of electoral votes from the several states in the coming presidential election. [John] Marshall moved against this too, this time with success. But although he thereby helped save his Federalist colleagues from more short-wittedness, they were hardly  disposed to thank him for it. The joint committee envisioned by the Ross bill was to have the final determination on any question concerning the election; any "irregularity" would be whatever the committee said it was; and so it would rest with this body of thirteen men, chosen by a Federalist-dominated Congress, to decide who should be the next President of the United States. Nor was it any secret that the bill had been especially shaped to deal with what the state of Pennsylvania was likely to do in the election, that state's government having just turned Republican, or that such a committee would be peculiarly receptive to any plausible ground for counting out Thomas Jefferson. Marshall had as little use for Jefferson as any Federalist in the House. But this scheme as he saw it was not only unconstitutional, it was disreputable, and politically demented. What he then did with his influence, on the floor and in committee, was to get the bill altered to a form in which it could no longer carry out the function its originators had designed it for, whereupon the Senate would have no more to do with it.

Section 6, Federalism and the "Campaign" of 1800The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, Chapter XV, "The Mentality of Federalism in 1800", Section 6, "Federalism and the 'Campaign' of 1800".