I spent part of the afternoon downtown yesterday, something I don’t usually do. I had to change some tickets at the Shakespeare Theatre, which I like to do in person, although you can also do it online. It’s just easier to talk with the person making the exchange about available seats when you are right there, rather than when you are looking at a screen. Or at least, that is what I think.

So I went down to the theater, which is at the corner of 6th and F NW, and did my business in about 90 seconds. My next stop was at the corner of 14th and I, about a mile away. It was a beautiful day, so I walked.

Digression: You know the British comedian Philomena Cunk? You can look her up. I saw a reel she made, asking a Shakespeare scholar about whether Shakespeare was a good student. She was told he was. But she then pooh-poohed it, saying it was easier to be a good student in those days. After all, she said, he never had to study Shakespeare. End of digression.

While everything was familiar, a number of things did seem out of whack. In the first place, there really wasn’t much traffic. Not much automotive traffic, not much pedestrian traffic. Most people were not waiting at corners until the WALK signals came on, because at least at half of the intersections, there was no traffic to keep you on the sidewalks. When I say “no traffic”, I mean “no traffic”.

Secondly, the shops were all empty. This is an area of office buildings and not a heavy retail area, but there are several clothing shops, and others of various types. I did not see anyone in any of them. As to the restaurants, of which there are many, I don’t know. You can’t see into most of them, and it was about 3 p.m., so not a meal time.

Thirdly, there are a lot of empty retail spaces. Sometimes, two or three on a block. Five years ago, these spaces would all have been filled.

Everything looked good, and the streets and sidewalks were clean, but downtown is still suffering from the repercussions of COVID. Recovery is still not at hand. My guess is that there is a lot of empty office space on the streets of my walk. And if the offices are not filled, there will be no business for the shops, the restaurants will struggle, and no one will rent empty spaces.

Last evening, I watched most of Trump’s speech in Corinth, Mississippi. It was a pretty typical Trump speech. He pretty much ignored the person whose campaign he came down to support, and talked mainly about his own accomplishments, reeling off as many statistics that his teleprompter could hold. Crime down, jobs up, tariffs working, Iran on the ropes, illegal immigrants a thing of the past. You know the drill.

All of these statistics can be fact checked. Some will be accurate, some inaccurate, some accurate but needing context, and some just speculative but addressed as if factual.

I was of course interest in his “facts” about crime in Washington DC, which he talks about in speech after speech. Basically, he says that crime is down in Washington DC, which it is, and he cites the homicide rate, which this year to date is 50% or so below 2025’s. Of course, he doesn’t mention one important statistic where crime rates are sharply up this year — assault with a deadly weapon. But in most other categories, crime is down.

Of course, crime in Washington, like crime in most places, is not spread evenly across the city. Washington has eight wards, and crime is higher in some than in others. Property crimes occur most in commercial area, and homicides in the lower income wards. Ward 3, where we live, has the lowest crime rates in, I think, every category. Trump, however, portrays all of Washington as having been totally crime-ridden when he came into office. He tells the people in Corinth Mississippi (most of whom have never been to DC, I would bet) that people used to be afraid to leave their houses, that restaurants used to be empty and going out of business, that tourists and young people moving into the city were, on a regular basis, cut down, so that DC officials were always calling parents telling them that their beautiful sons and daughters had been shot down on the streets of DC. We are so sorry.

But, no more. DC is now one of the safest cities in the country. Of course that is not yet the case. Restaurants are so busy that you can hardly get a table (in fact restaurants are struggling with high food prices and a smaller group of potential hires), there are not enough space to even open a new restaurants (I can show you seven or eight from my walk today) and every body who lives here, or comes here, is just as happy as happy can be. And it is all because of Donald J. Trump.

He didn’t mention (at least when I was watching) the reflecting pool, the destroyed golf course, the destroyed White House lawn, the gilded statues on Memorial Bridge, the closed Kennedy Center, the proposed 250 foot triumphal arch, etc. He didn’t mention how every one of his “improvements” to DC are hated by the vast majority of residents. Just that Washington was in shambles, that only he could fix it, and that only he did. I don’t know what Corinth Mississippi thinks of this part of his talk.

He also talked about how the White House was falling apart when he moved in and how it is now in super duper tip top shape, thanks to…….him. It’s in better shape, he said twice, than it was in 1792, when it was built. Of course, it was not built until the early 1800s, and in 1792, there was no Washington DC, but maybe those inaccuracies can be forgiven him based on his ignorance. I don’t know.

We will see what happens between now and next Tuesday, when voting is concluded and the midterms decided. Polls really do favor the Democrats, but Trump does still have some of his charisma, is still able to make his partisans wary of anything the Democrats do, and just may be able to pull some rabbits out of his hat.

Speaking of rabbits out of his hat, I did not have hasenpfeffer for lunch yeaterday, but I did have (ta-da!) lamb meatball shakshuka, with two eggs, roasted garbanzos, pomegranate seeds, and za’atar. It was at Silver, on Wisconsin Avenue in Cleveland Park, and I ordered it because it seemed to have so many barely relatable ingredients, and I was curious. Turns out, it was quite good, somewhat to my surprise. So I do recommend it.

One last thing, and on a sad note. You might (probably don’t) remember that I wrote about St. Louis Hawk star Bob Pettit died last month in his early 90s, and the extent to which his death was reported all across the country. I also said that his teammate Cliff Hagen seemed to be the only living member of the Hawks’ teams of the late 1950s, and that was living at age 94 in his hometown of Owensboro, KY. Well, a few days ago, I read that Hagen, a star just as Petit was, had passed away, just one month after Pettit. Now the entire team is gone.