Rollerball...where's James Caan?

"This movie will haunt your future ... because it's almost here!" And now it is, in DC's National Guard Armory, but without the motorbikes or death, and with considerably greater representation of the local LGBT community than I remember in the film. Oh, and it's called Roller Derby, not Rollerball.

Roller Derby has two packs of four blockers whipping round a circular track in the kitchest costumes they can find pursued by “jammers”. The jammers have to force their way through the pack and then score points by lapping the opposition. You can see the scope for a few falls. The first row of seated trackside fans were read a legal disclaimer before having several players land skates up in their midst.

Saturday’s double bill opened with a bout (bouts are games, jams are plays...stay with me) between the Cherry Blossom Bombshells and the DC Demon Cats. After which league champions Scare Force One gave the Secretaries of Hate a helmet denting, knee pad scraping, micro skirt tearing sixty-plus point pasting. It writes itself really.

Actually, the afternoon opened with the national anthem, the entire hall standing silently with their eyes raised to a star spangled banner hung high above the gymnasium floor. Even the counter culture is patriotic I mused, struggling to take a photo with one hand on my heart.

There were also a surprising number of US servicemen amongst the students, bohos, hipsters, Ls, Gs, Bs and Ts. I thought maybe they were there for the same reason the devil and I were: the prospect of violence, kitch violence, but violence nonetheless. But I am told sports venues often resort to ticket bombing the military when paying audiences are scarce. WWF survived several lean years on the fatigued when the pubescent were in uncommonly short supply.

I suspect the other good thing about military audiences is that they can be relied upon to stand when required, cheer when appropriate, and not boo unless you set fire to a flag. In other words, the kind of reliability that President Bush might have enjoyed as he threw the first pitch of the baseball season on Sunday night.

Of course, it may have been that the crowd, gathered for the inaugural game in the country's newest stadium dedicated to the national sport right in the heart of its capitol were simply too excited to chant the second half of the President's name. And perhaps if there had been enough servicemen chanting "Shhhh!" at the right time no-one would have noticed.

St Patrick's Day Cabs

DC cabs have lights on their roofs, but they're totally meaningless. "On or off, it don't make no difference." Actually, occupied or not, it don't make no difference. DC cabs can pick up an extra fare and get paid twice, as long as it doesn't take the original occupant more than five blocks out of their way. You don't pay on a meter, you pay by the zone. It happened to me on my first day in DC, I jumped in the front at the lights, only to find a (very attractive) woman in the back seat. It didn't really work out between us, but other residents swear it's better odds than J-Date. Unfortunately, it's all going to change, no more brief encounters in the back of cabs, or wildly erratic cab fares.

The consequences on Sunday morning were less romantic. St Patrick's Day is a three day event here and DC has been full of (more-or-less) hyphenated Americans in matching joke shop green all weekend. It certainly leant the Six Nations - showing in a sole Irish pub on the corner of 7th & H - a suitably Celtic atmosphere on Saturday. But by 3am on Sunday it was pissing with rain, and by the time I finally found a cab that wasn't trying to charge me double fare on the grounds that I was wet and he was dry, the streets of Adams Morgan were full of drunken, drenched, bright green 20-somethings looking for transport amongst the puddles and streaming neon.

It was raining so hard that no-one could tell which cabs were occupied, let alone whether they were occupied with anyone they'd want to squeeze in beside. So we crawled down U-street with people weaving into our path, banging on the hood, palms pressed against the windows, imploring, threatening, begging for a ride.

It felt like the fall of Saigon. Which is a bit much after five hours of whiskey tasting in honor of St Paddy. So I sunk into the rear seats, steeling myself with the occasional slug of Laphroaig and wondered if I should get a helicopter from the roof of the nearest embassy.

Fort Myer

Drove out to VA looking for a car. We found Mitsubishi, but it was their corporate headquarters, not their showroom. There are limits to Google Maps, mostly mine.

So we headed south east, and after several wrong turns were in sight of the highway. Which is when I missed yet another turn and mistook a guard-post for a toll-booth. The automatic rifles and military uniforms under the hi-vis jackets stopped the search for loose change. America is well armed but toll-booth attendants are probably excused the obligatory six shooters worn by everyone else in authority. We could expect a surge in suicides if nothing else.

I expected aggressive suspicion followed by a torturous many pointed turn in front of the monster truck I'd just cut up. So we scrambled around for my State Dept ID in my satchel - or manbag, an item I suspect might have threatened their don't ask, don't tell recruitment policy - in the hope that it'd buy us a little time.

But the guards of Fort Myer, for it was America's newest garrison command, turned out to be a very welcoming, and I suspect used to idiots missing an entire highway and turning up at their gates looking a bit sheepish. So they guided us round a loop and back towards the highway, a young hispanic private in Oakleys giving us directions down to Springfield. Though this was only after we had driven through the vehicle check and popped the trunk.