>> The Capitol Christmas Tree lighting ceremony is scheduled to take place at 5 p.m. this evening on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. >> Washington-area writers Michelle Brafman, Merle Collins, T. Greenwood, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, Faye Moskowitz, Barbara Mujica, Jessica Neely, Amy Stolls, Hananah Zaheer, and Christy J. Zink will be at Politics and Prose to read from their contributions to the latest anthology, Electric Grace: Still More Fiction by Washington Area Women.......

A Post business columnist and an independent music non-profit have joined the chorus questioning Live Nation's proposal for a Silver Spring music hall. Last Friday, Steven Pearlstein wrote that while I.M.P. boss Seth Hurwitz has fought against competition for his 9:30 Club before, and his alternative proposal to Live Nation is in his own best interest, "he's put forward a financial proposal attractive enough that county officials cannot ignore it." Under their non-binding letter of......

Fried Chicken Frenzy Returns Fried chicken fanatics have something to get excited about. Both Colorado Kitchen and Ray's the Classics have restored their famous versions of the dish. Everyone lamented when Gillian Clark pulled her chicken from the menu a few years ago. But now, she is hosting burgers and fried chicken nights on December 11 and January 8 (the second Tuesday of the month). Apparently her chicken is so good that she told......

We were alerted yesterday via the Art Law Blog that the U.S. Department of the Interior is gearing up to change motion and still photography rules on federally run lands. In an amendment to current regulations, three DOI agencies, the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Services, and the National Park Service, will be authorized to charge standardized fees to and require a permit from commercial photographers who want to shoot in an area......

"The trouble with radicals,” goes a quote widely attributed to early 20th century economist Thomas Nixon Carver, “is that they only read radical literature, and the trouble with conservatives is that they don’t read anything.” That both sides of the political spectrum have proven that to be a lie will be apparent tomorrow tonight at the Trover Shop on Capitol Hill, which is hosting The Hill’s Sixth Annual Political Book Fair. Participating authors include current......

MONDAY: Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert D. Kaplan will be at Politics and Prose to discuss his latest book, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts. According to Kaplan, journalists are too quick to report on the negative aspects of the military. Commence with bickering over the Iraq war ... now. 7 p.m. TUESDAY: Blogger Diane Vadino will be at Olsson's in Dupont Circle to read from her first novel, Smart Girls Like Me. 7 p.m. She'll also......

Good morning, Washington. It's just a gorgeous day outside right now, with temperatures currently in the 70s and only predicted to reach the upper 80s later this afternoon, which is about the best we can hope for in mid-August. Please make plans to eat your lunch outside accordingly, as this surely won't last through the week. Need a good story to gab about with your officemates as you head out into the sunshine? A......

RAMMY's All Around! Sunday was the Restaurant Area of Metropolitan Washington's 25th annual RAMMY awards, the local dining scene's big gala event. 1,500 people packed the Marriott in Woodley Park, listened to speeches, clapped for the winners, danced like teenage hooligans, and probably drank more booze than they wanted to/were happy about the next day. But, why else would so many people get together in one place? Oh, the awards? Yeah, I'll get to them.......

If you're into the Washington City Paper, approach this week's issue with care -- it's not a quick read. This week the city's premiere alternative weekly profiles investigative journalist Murray Waas, using some 21,514 words over the course of three articles to attack his journalistic standards and detail a long-running feud between the paper's staff and Waas. If that many words don't mean much to you, think of it this way -- only 11,000 or......

Review and photos by DCist contributor Paul Ghosh-Roy They don’t speak English. Their sound system consists of PA style loud speakers draped with mics. They play thumb pianos. The guy who formed the band was born in 1933. They also have a track produced by Timbaland on Bjork’s new album. Oh yeah, and they played the Black Cat on Friday night. What to make of all this, you ask? Well, it’s Konono No. 1, son,......

The Humane Society of the United States has just released a new Humane Index of U.S. Cities. The site includes rankings for the top 25 most populous cities in the country, broken down by categories like number of retail shops that sell fur, or ratio of wildlife watchers to hunters, all presented in a pretty nifty interactive format that allows you to sort by category and compare one city to another. So how does D.C.......

>> After the fire at Georgetown Public Library, DDOT warns that Wisconsin Ave. Southbound is still blocked at 34th Street NW, Northbound Traffic is blocked at Q Street NW. East-West Routes are and will continue to be congested >> Scads of dead or dying fish are surfacing in the Shenandoah River, again. [Washington Times] >> Arlington's Booeymonger really means it when they say their parking is for 20 minutes only. [Andyland via DC Blogs]......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. It's nearly two years now since the great Housing Boom of the Aughts© peaked. While prices have leveled off or declined in many places, the affordability of homes in metropolitan areas as an issue has not gone away. In central cities in particular, where the issue of gentrification is most sensitive, prices have shown the most resilience. Certainly, matters haven't changed enough......

This morning our local ABC affiliate, WJLA, decided to stop showing the disturbing images sent to NBC News by Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung Hui. The package of still photos and videos was sent by Cho in the hours between the first and second shootings and show him wielding the murder weapons and delivering obscenity-laced diatribes. Since the footage was released on Wednesday, it has flooded TV screens, prompting some viewers and victims' family......

A couple days ago we mentioned Ford CEO Alan Mulally's tale of his harrowing visit with President Bush. He told a room full of journalists in New York that he had to think fast when Bush tried to insert a live power cord into a hybrid car's hydrogen tank, saying he quickly pushed Bush out of the way to prevent disaster. The story exploded (much like sparked hydrogen) on the Internet after The Detroit Free......

Controversy In Captivity From the disturbed minds at the Onion News Network: Fictional National Zoo giant panda Yun Mei is pro-choice. >> As part of a promotion for his new movie, Kickin' It Old School, Jamie Kennedy taped himself breakdancing at various locations all over Washington, D.C. We know, we couldn't believe Jamie Kennedy still had a career, either. [AOL Video Blog] >> Jimmy Kimmel gave Gawker editor Emily Gould a right serious spanking during......

>> The White House could soon feel more like elementary school for reporters. It seems there are concerns that media personnel are roaming the halls unsupervised under the guise of going to the bathroom. Now White House officials are threatening to force journalists to be escorted to and from the john. Will this also stop the bad girls from smoking in the bathroom? [FishbowlDC] >> Apparently, someone in Rockville has had it up to here......

We know, we know. Bloggers, like all journalists, are supposed to be hyper-skeptical of everything that comes across their monitors, only acquiescing after the most rock solid of facts are in. Well, forgive our optimism and idealism, but whenever we see any forward movement at the statehouse down in Richmond, we can't help but get a little giddy. This week in transit, we look at the motivating forces of partisan democracy in Virginia, the......

>> Normally, Adrian Fenty hearts the press, and the feeling goes both ways. So why did he assiduously try to keep the media out of his official swearing-in Tuesday? The City Paper has the skinny on the secrecy surrounding the event, including secret entrances for councilmembers, who were told to "arrive alone." [Loose Lips] >> Just in case there weren't enough stereotypes of women in power, new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hosted a tea party......

Call us old fashioned, but we like our year-end backward glances to come after we're done furiously ripping open presents and before we pop the champagne for New Year's. Rather than subject you only to what we on the DCist music staff deemed this year's best and brightest (don't worry, we'll do that too), we asked a handful of our favorite local artists what their favorite albums of 2006 were. A lot of great musicians......

Mike Watt, founder of the Minutemen, drew angry protests on the Georgetown campus yesterday when-- hang on. What?...I'm sorry, my producers have informed me that it was actually Chris Simcox, founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, and not the founder of the seminal southern California punk band. They also have informed me that I'm fired. Once we got past the understandable confusion caused by Fox5’s headline we learned that Simcox drew a large crowd......

Among local journalists, no one had the blogosphere reaching for their sarcasm tags like the Washington Post's Laura Sessions Stepp. You may remember the apex of her collected letters from last May, when the Style Section editor condemned numerous column inches to death by publishing her infamous "wingman" article. The article, deemed by Rusty at Why.I.Hate.DC to be "The Most Asinine Article" ever, casts Stepp as an odd amalgam of The Glass Menagerie's Amanda Wingfield......

Dear readers: Just like Mike, Rob, and Ryan before me, today I'm stepping down as DCist's Editor-in-Chief. Sommer is going to continue to shepard the site for the months to come, and given the work she's done so far, I know she'll do an excellent job. I'm not going away altogether, though -- I'm hoping to start writing longer pieces on issues that escape from the immediacy of day-to-day news blogging. Writing and editing for......

MONDAY The troubled Americans of the McSweeney’s empire have built their legacy on ironic footnote deployments, mock mawkishness, and the transformation of the esoteric into the sublime. Plus some funny-ass lists and stuff. Tonight, join Evany Thomas and Dustin Long as they read from The Secret Language of Sleep and Icelander, respectively. It will be like staring into the face of God. Olsson’s Dupont Circle, 1307 19th St. NW, 7 p.m. TUESDAY Ariel Dorfman comes......

There appears to be something about the subjects of population, education, and growth in the District that makes local journalists a little nuts. That is what we're left to conclude after reading today's Post article on D.C. schools and the growing shadow they're ready to cast on this year's local elections. The main point of the piece is an incontrovertible one: despite some successes and increased government action, many District schools are failing to meet......

As we all know, Canadian bands are so hot right now. Whether it's the soaring arrangements of the Arcade Fire, the art pop of Stars or the hope-inducing rock of Wolf Parade, everyone's got a little love for our neighbors to the north. Tonight, the lesser-hyped but equally Canadian Kiss Me Deadly visits DC. They've made some adjustments to their math-rock roots and are transitioning into a more danceable sound that's garnering plenty of praise......

There's no shortage of problems for today's print media. From business models that appear fundamentally flawed to allegations of bias (from all sides, no less), an editor can invoke plenty of demons to keep him up nights. But of all the troublesome pests hiding under print journalists' beds, it seems the biggest, ugliest, and sleep-deprivingest is the aesthetic appeal of one's internet page. Pity the poor newsmen sitting bolt upright in cold sweats, fretting over......

It was just a few weeks back that the Washington City Paper completed a long overdue overhaul to their website, and now they have followed many a mainstream media mainstay before them and jumped on the blogging bandwagon. It wasn't long ago that the CPers were complaining about the prospect; in a March 17th piece on Washington Post blogging requirements without additional pay, City Paper editor Erik Wemple noted, "Full disclosure: The Washington City Paper......

All is not well at WJLA/NewsChannel 8. In an ad placed today in the Express, NABET-CWA Local 31 announced the start of a boycott of local ABC affiliates WJLA and NewsChannel 8, which they accuse of stripping away worker rights. The ad reads: Imagine a show where company bosses refuse to grant workers equal pay for equal work. Or the company disrespects family values and cancels vacation time which was requested a year in advance.......

Good morning, Washington. Has your tap water been tasting better recently? There might be a good reason: the Post reports that, in a letter sent to its customers, WASA states that levels of lead in the District's water have fallen to less than half of the maximum allowed by federal regulation. The improvement is in part thanks to the addition of orthophosphate to the water supply — which, for all we know, may be a......