what's up the pike: everything old is new again (and again)

- Check out the fourth-annual South Silver Spring Block Party, held tomorrow from 1 to 6pm. There will be dozens of local food vendors, music, a bake-off with celebrity judges (Warren Brown, perhaps?), and a beer garden sponsored by Fire Station 1. Meanwhile, Reemberto Rodriguez writes about the significance of block parties here and throughout the country.

- The so-called "Preppy Burglar" who's been robbing houses in Howard County while wearing a shirt and tie is from Silver Spring, reports the Post. I kind of proud we could field such a dapper thief, because it wasn't too long ago that a "Preppy Burglar" would've had to come from Bethesda.

- Sushi at Nava Thai? Why, yes. The City Paper reviews the new sushi bar at the Wheaton restaurant. Pan-Asian menus often worry me (see Siu's Asian Bistro in Calverton), and reviewer Tim Carman confirms my suspicions. "Few things are as easy to spot as cut-rate or amateur sushi," he writes. "The small sampling of nigiri sushi I bought at Nava came awfully close to falling into these categories."

- It could be argued that you'll catch more flies with honey, but in the case of Sk8ter Mom's post on "Old Farts and Player-Hating," perhaps it's more fun to call it like you see it. (I do wonder which approach will guarantee the creation of more space for skateboarding in Silver Spring - or anything else, for that matter.)

- A few weeks ago, I asked readers what this 1980's-era drawing (found in the county's Department of Housing and Community Affairs office in Rockville) of a proposed building in downtown Silver Spring was supposed to be. Both Sligo and @pagodat pointed out that it was a proposed renovation of Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory, which was located in downtown Silver Spring until moving to Howard County in 1977.

Pagodat used cues from the drawing to locate it on Georgia Avenue behind the Lee Building on what today is a parking lot (and what will eventually become part of a new office and hotel development behind the Fillmore).

After the APL moved out of Silver Spring, the county sought ways to make the building relevant again by giving it a new, modern face. In fact, that's already happened before. Compare this photo (at right) of the car dealership Hopkins took over to open the lab in 1942 with this postcard from ten years later to see how they sought to reuse an even older building for their purposes. (You can see the window pattern of the old car dealership in the right side of the new and proposed iterations of the APL.)