Which stories did DCist readers think merited the most attention this year? Top 10 Most Commented Posts of 2007 10) D.C. Judge Seeks $67 Million for Lost Pants (105 comments) 9) Columbia Heights Listserve vs. Ross (107 comments) 8) Saving the Single Beer (108 comments) 7) This City Doth Protest Too Much (109 comments) 6) Solo Marines Often Refused Entry to Some D.C. Bars (113 comments) 5) Bars Claim Loss of Business Over Smoking......

It's hard to believe that a musical could get you hooked on phonics. But spelling suddenly becomes irresistible in "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," the touring production of the Broadway hit, now playing at the National Theater. The pleasing, goofy show takes an amalgam of precocious, oddball kids and makes you root for them all. There are archetypes for sure -- the obsessive Asian kid, the nasal, self-important geek -- but each one......

Dysfunctional relationship musicals...the Odyssey revisited...a one-nun show...one can't say the D.C. theater scene is relying only on Halloween for their October programming inspiration (though we do, at least, have some Poe still playing). Here's an overview of what's opening this month. Not only a new show, but a new theater! Bethesda Theatre hopes that I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, a relationship musical which has been compared to Seinfeld in its sensibilities, will become......

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......

Via Best Week Ever, CNN's Kyra Phillips Kiran Chetry learns that interviewing kids is the toughest job in news the hard way. It doesn't help that her interviewee, Evan O'Dorney, the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee held here in D.C. last week, seems to be a particularly tough nut to crack. If watching a truly uncomfortable situation makes you cringe more than smile, you might want to skip this one.......

Evan O'Dorney, a 13-year-old from Danville, Calif., became the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion last night. His winning word was "serrefine" -- a noun describing small forceps used for approximating the edges of a wound -- which he successfully spelled after a long, tense final showdown with Nate Gartke of Spruce Grove, Alberta. Gartke had hoped to become the first Canadian to win the bee. If anyone out there watched the last few rounds......

Today a select group of the world's wordiest tweens take the stage at the annual lexicon smackdown known as the National Spelling Bee. Almost 300 students will spend the next two days at the Grand Hyatt on H St. competing in written and oral tests of their spelling skills, culminating in Thursday's final round, to be aired nationwide on ABC. The Examiner has a profile of one of the circuit's best-known competitors, facing his......

As our Gothamist friends picked up back in 2005, 28-year-old comedienne Jennifer Dziura is a pretty funny gal. After reading her bio, I quickly realized that I wanted to be her. The Dartmouth philosophy grad is a human smorgasbord, with past stints as a contraceptive tester, naked model for miscellaneous art schools, trapeze assistant, dot-com entrepreneur, and occasional comedy writer for McSweeney's and the Idiot's Guide to Jokes. Every Monday she emcees Williamsburg’s “Spelling Bee"......

MONDAY No, he didn’t make An Inconvenient Truth, but climate change policy wonks will probably turn out to throw Joseph Romm a bone as he signs Hell and High Water: Global Warming—the Solution and the Politics—and What We Should Do. At Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW., at 7 p.m. WEDNESDAY When the men of a remote mountain village in Colombia are abducted by guerrillas, the women left behind learn how to get by......

Good morning, D.C. Seeing as we're in the midst of the annual summer spike in crime, you might be feeling a little vulnerable right now. Well, good news! It turns out that we can at least stop worrying quite so much about terrorist attacks — according to DHS, anyway. In order to justify the recent cuts to anti-terror funding for the District, the agency has begun explaining that we simply aren't that likely to be......

It seems like spelling bees are popular nowadays – recently we talked about the D.C. Bee spelling bee for adults, and before that there was the documentary "Spellbound" and the Starbucks tie-in movie "Akeelah and the Bee." But today the World Series of spelling bees kicked off, and right in our backyard. The first round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee started earlier today in D.C., with the second round set for this afternoon and......

Yesterday's immigration rally was big news in the city, no matter what side of the issue you are on. I, unfortunately, left my camera at home, but not so for Flickr user maxedaperture. This photo was taken on a Canon EOS 20D. The EXIF data can be found here. There are plenty of other pictures from the rally in the DCist tag pool, as well as photos from last night's Ghostface Killah concert (how......