It's been quite a week for the Orange line, with three long delays in three days (not to mention last week's storm-related delays). Monday's derailment of a train between the Rosslyn and Court House stations left people clamoring for a way to get home, but luckily, it wasn't as severe as it could have been. Of course, no one would argue that being stuck in a tunnel for a long time with air conditioning on......

Libertarian-leaning Republican presidential candidate and hero of the Internets Ron Paul has gotten himself a blimp, and it's headed this way. According to a just-released flight plan, the blimp, which will read "Who is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul" on one side and "Ron Paul Revolution" on the other, will launch from Elizabeth City, N.C., Monday and flyover Washington circa 3 p.m. the same day, with a rally planned for 4 p.m. and another re-launch......

If you've taken a D.C. taxicab since the stroke of midnight last night, you may have been surprised by a cab driver insisting that you pay an extra $1 gas surcharge. Didn't the gas surcharge expire in September? It did, but last week the D.C. Taxicab Commission quietly passed an emergency measure to bring back the $1 fee, beginning at 12:01 a.m. this morning and lasting until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, January 29, 2008. “Prices......

Three of the Capitals' best five offensive players are still out with minor injuries. That's the good news. The bad news is that, after being absolutely destroyed by the Carolina Hurricanes last night, the Caps are tied with the Atlanta Thrashers for the worst record in the East at 5-9-0. Last night's loss would have been easier to explain if the Caps were missing ten, or maybe twenty of their best players. Two Hurricanes scored......

Early yesterday morning, the tragic news was announced. On Myspace, a bulletin appeared that read: Ian Mackaye, lead singer of influential hardcore band Minor Threat as well as Fugazi passed away today in a Baltimore hospital room. Outside a Fugazi show in New Jersey last night, the singer was struck by a car passing by the front of the Ventura Theatre. Brunswick police say that the driver allegedly stopped, but then fled the scene. There......

Written by DCist contributor Andrew Chriss Falls Church offers a diverse array of ethnic cuisine, providing a homespun, lower cost alternative to higher-priced and better-decorated offerings in the District. That being said, it's been a while since the days when I frequented the BBQ, kosher deli, and pho establishments in Loehmann's Plaza. On this night, the destination was Eden Center, Falls Church's Vietnamese epicenter on Wilson Boulevard in Seven Corners. But where to eat? The......

>> There's a new webcam available showing the progress of Monument Realty's Half Street project, which includes the expansion of the Navy Yard Metro station. [Near Southeast DC Redevelopment] >> Georgetown student pleads not guilty in hate crime investigation. [WJLA/AP] >> Members of the Metro board representing D.C. are pushing for higher parking fees at suburban stations in order to avoid increasing bus fares. [Examiner] >> A bunch of streets will be closed this......

Dulles-based AOL announced today it will move its corporate headquarters to New York. The shift is just another in a series of announcements regarding an overall restructuring of the Internet service provider that has included massive layoffs and a switch from fee-based subscriptions to a reliance on advertising revenue. The New York move was explained by AOL to be designed to place executives closer to the advertising industry based in Manhattan. So far we're hearing......

YouTube user artschoolscrewup only recently uploaded this video from D.C.'s July 4th parade, which shows the guy playing Uncle Sam on stilts falling on his butt. A quick search reveals that Uncle Sam on Stilts Taking Abuse is on its way to becoming its own YouTube genre, but questions abound: is it funny for any Uncle Sam to look silly, or only ones on stilts? And why the prevalence of putting Sam on stilts......

Londonist are starting to think their city is getting just a little bit too expensive, when even Christian Slater can't afford to go out there. And there's no escaping, as local singer Lily Allen discovered when she was barred entry to the US. The British mapping agency caused further bad karma, by blocking a 3-D representation of London in Google Earth. But the smiles returned to Londonist's faces as they interviewed Baroness von Reichardt,......

Good morning, Washington. We've just been catching up on the rather scary looking but thankfully not terror-related explosion in Manhattan yesterday. Naturally, our parent site Gothamist has complete coverage of the steam explosion that occurred on East 41st and Lexington Avenue (41st between Lex and Third) just before 6 p.m. yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the explosion, which killed one person and injured 30, had New Yorkers worried for a while, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said......

>> We tragically forgot to mention in About Tonight that all left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers will gather on the Mall for Screen on the Green's first showing of the summer, Annie Hall. The movie starts just after sunset on the screen between 4th and 7th, NW. Bring an umbrella and/or a Faraday cage, as the thunderstorm watch goes until 9 p.m., but the screening is more or less rain or shine, unless lightning......

Some of you may remember our venerable DCist Maps project, which provided an overlay of the D.C. Metro system in the classic WMATA style, plus the ability to build your own customized maps. We were proud of the li'l guy, but he had clearly begun to show his age: designed in an era when 800x600 was still a common screen resolution, the map window was ridiculously small. And although we spent an awfully long time......

The Associated Press has discovered the one thing State Department employees are more frightened of than a backlog of passport applications: wasps! Cicada-killer wasps to be precise, which have infested areas around the State Department's headquarters at the Harry S. Truman building on C Street NW. A memo obtained by the AP tries to calm the fears of Stateys regarding the menacing looking wasps by pointing out that they are "generally not aggressive and do......

There's been all kinds of crazy stuff found on Google's new StreetView application, which we wrote about before - guys who appear to be peeing on the side of the road, climbing fences into houses, and so on. While D.C. won't be getting StreetView for a little while longer, there is still some strange stuff to be seen with good ol' Google Maps. Joyriding has long been a problem in D.C., where (usually) kids steal......

Andre the Giant, Schmandre the Giant. The other day we noticed one of these stickers on a lamppost at about 13th and R Streets NW. It's good to see some grassroots (lamp roots?) support for the D.C. United star, and Dan Steinberg over at the D.C. Sports Bog has been on the case for some time. For those who don't know, "tiene un posse" is a reference to the Andre the Giant Has a......

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. In Gothamist's neck of the woods, they found out that many things are possible: A man caught a 40+ pound fish off the Rockaways and took it home on the subway. Graffiti......

If you're anything like us, you've been experiencing major geek covetousness ever since Google Maps launched its Street View functionality late last month. The feature (which may seem similar to past users of Amazon's A9.com) shows street-level photos of locations. Users can move smoothly from spot to spot, rotating their view and taking in the sights. Unfortunately, Google Maps' coverage of D.C. doesn't feature any of the blue outlines that signify Street View-equipped roads. But......

Seattlest has a talk with the photographer from last week's "Segway Mom" and then experiences some dissension in the ranks over the question of wine vs. beer. It's not West Side Story, but about as close as they'll get. They're also still waiting on some inbox relief after a spammer is arrested. As Chicagoist counts down the days to its third anniversary party, they found all-organic pizza to be underwhelming amidst the hoopla, tried......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

Though the initial shock of seeing Eastern Market almost consumed by flames has passed, members of the community have ramped up fundraising efforts to ensure that the rebuilding begins as quickly as possible and the displaced vendors are cared for. On Tuesday, May 8, a number of bars will direct a percentage of their proceeds to the Capitol Hill Community Foundation, which is serving as focal point for Eastern Market-related fundraising efforts. So far,......

Who needs government when we have Google? Yesterday, we reported that DDOT's suggestion for a new and (slightly) improved D.C. Taxi Zone Map is being needlessly hamstrung by the lovely people over at the D.C. Taxicab Commission. They feel that city streets on the new map appear too bright and, you know, visible. Lucky for us, technology, in its quest to make the world as we know it obsolete, has intervened. We stumbled upon this......

Good morning, Washington. We really wish we had some good news to share in regards to the local weather forecast, but it's starting to seem as though the more often we refresh the weather page, the worse the predictions actually get. So new rule this morning. We'll only talk about kittens and lollipops and pretty pretty ribbons until we get at least two days in a row with sunshine. Our strategy is clear: annoy the......

Google Voice Local Search, aka Google 411 Experimental or just Goog-411, a free telephone-based information service, has apparently been live in Google Labs for several months now, but of course a lot of folks didn't take much notice until the ubiquitous TechCrunch finally posted about it late last week. Thanks to their influence, it's been making the rounds of just about everything in our RSS reader, so we thought we'd give it a spin and......

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like......

Back in the day, people would gather to lobby, write letters and protest for a cause. These days, all it takes is access to a computer and a creative approach to using online tools. And while the fight for District voting rights has involved a good amount of old-school tactics, online activists have more resources at their disposal than ever before. Newly-elected Shadow Representative Mike Panetta has been leading this fight in recent years, employing......

Last week the Wizards signed former GW forward Mike Hall to a 10-day contract, making him the second Colonial from last year's team to make it to the NBA. The first was Pops Mensah-Bonsu, who scored the first points by a GW player in the NBA since Yinka "the Stinka" Dare in 1998. Neither look to play much this season, but it got us thinking - where are all the other players from local colleges?......

We've had the displeasure to write about the demise of area records stores recently, with Revolution and Tower joining DCCD in the big bargain bin in the sky. However, the D.C. area is still home to some good music stores, and thanks to blogger Ben Welsh and Google Maps, we have a quick way of finding them.Welsh put together a map showing local record shops, making it easy to find where to get Pitchfork's......

What's better than happy hour? Maps with lots of happy hours. Thanks to Google Maps, there are a few drunken mashup sites that map bar specials in D.C. for that special time of day. The two we've found, Unthirsty.com and Drinktown.com show user-submitted happy hours around the country and detail the food and drink specials each day. Unthirsty even says if there's patio seating or wi-fi, in case you want to do some tipsy instant......

Halloween is Tuesday, which means this weekend was really the time for all of the –ists to celebrate. And whether they’re designing super-spooky costumes or talking about the super-spooky upcoming elections, we’d say that they’re doing a fine job of it. Austinist knows that few things in life are scarier than zombies, people with way too much money, and politicians who try too hard to be funny. Slightly less scary, depending on whom you......