Don’t let the threat of Polonium poisoning crush your dreams of becoming a spy or the inevitable prison sentence keep you from robbing a bank. We understand your desire to solve ancient religious conspiracies shrouded in mystery and international intrigue, but perhaps you don’t want to get your hands dirty. Joshua Czarda, the brains behind Ravenchase Adventures, has a solution. He and his crack team of writers and actors want you to step inside a... more ›

LAist is flashing a sad peace out to their editor Carolyn Kellogg with one hand and bumping knuckles with their new head typist L.A. blogger king Tony Pierce with the other. Where do ist editors go when they hang up the 'editorial we'? They take on MySpace, apparently. At least Ben Brown does. Austinist reminds of the just rewards of less savory careers this week and then they witness the Arctic Monkeys and We Are... more ›

When Gustav Mahler, near the end of his life, conducted the world premiere of his eighth symphony, in Munich in 1910, he did so with amassed musical forces — orchestra, eight vocal soloists, off-stage brass, and several large choruses of adults and children — numbering over 1,000 people. Although Mahler never liked the name, the work is still often known as the "Symphony of a Thousand." More an oratorio than a symphony in many ways, it ends with a mysterious exaltation of the Sacred Feminine (literally, Das Ewig-Weibliche), in the musical climax called the Chorus Mysticus. No, it has nothing to do with The Da Vinci Code. Although the end of Goethe's Faust would be a logical choice for a quick name-dropping reference in Dan Brown's hack novel, given how the man writes, it seems unlikely that he has read Faust. more ›

We don't know about any of you, but last summer we got pretty excited about the race for the future -- that of privately funded and manned space travel. The showdown for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which culminated in the victory of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, was a welcome distraction from the daily grind. Instead of worrying about an endless inbox of unreturned e-mails, we worried about whether the The Da Vinci team had finally secured a launch license. more ›

Those who love (or despise) Dan Brown's literary crack, some more details about his new book, which will be set in Washington, are coming to the surface. The NY Times reports that during a reporters roundtable, Brown's publisher let the title of the book slip. The "Da Vinci Code" author's new book is titled "The Solomon Key," which we're Googling right now to see what it may be tied to. more ›

A new blog hopes to highlight local music. D.C. MP3, which launched this week, intendes to select one song each week from the Washington Post's MP3 website, which provides "Self-publishing by and for the Metro region's music community." The site make downloading the MP3s simple - no registration, just clicking a legal agreement not to sell the music. more ›