Every Tuesday and Thursday, we run down what’s going on in local Internet discussion groups.

ANC-6A
One thread became a real pissing contest when the issue of racism in D.C. came up. Richard Layman posted this anecdote: “Yesterday I got into an argument with a guy urinating in the alley. His response ‘It’s none of your business…white people don’t own everything.’ I responded ‘I don’t own s****. But I can smell your urine. Furthermore, there’s a field behind you and urine doesn’t smell nearly as bad on organic material. It does on the brick and it ruins urine.’ Pissing in an alley isn’t about race, is it?” Sharon Cochran shot back with: “I’m not sure what your point is. I’ve seen many a guy pissing in public all over this city. I assumed it was because guys thought that they owned everything, and felt a need to mark their territory.”

Brookland
“For some of us Poetry is the sweetest thing around. But we realize that for many, somewhere along the way a horrible taste was left in your mouth about poetry,” reads a posting advertising Brookland Area Writers & Artists’ May 5 May 3 “Poetry Like Chocolate” event. “Maybe it was being forced to listen to poems and then dissect them like frogs in a science class. Instead of just enjoying the sound and ideas and spirit of the thing. Perhaps the bad taste dates back to when you had to memorize the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or Beowulf, or part of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (in the original tongue) in elementary school, or junior high, or high school?…What will it take to get you to poetry again?” As it happens, they’re banking on “fine single origin chocolate…from Equador, Belgium, and France.”

cleveland-park
A query yesterday morning from Kimberly Hasenberg: “Where would you recommend for tea for a friend’s birthday other than Four Seasons and the Ritz? (Hay Adams doesn’t do it anymore).”