Good morning, Washington. We apologize: it's not even December, and here we are running pictures of Christmas trees. But everyone else is doing it! More than one area radio station has already switched to 24x7 holiday music, and trees and tinsel are popping up everywhere. It's hard to resist when Flickrites like lancehayden start putting up appealing shots of the yuletide frenzy. Fairfax Restricts Handouts For The Homeless: It's getting tougher to feed the... more ›

On Saturday night, Washington National Opera unveiled the first installment, Das Rheingold, of its new staging of Richard Wagner's operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Kennedy Center Opera House. A co-production with San Francisco Opera, this "American Ring cycle" is the work of director Francesca Zambello and a team of American artistic collaborators. They have brought together images drawn from the history of the United States to transform Wagner's libretto, based on pre-Christian... more ›

Attendees at this year's National Book Festival certainly heard the protests as the crowd marched by a mere two blocks away and helicopters circled overhead. They certainly saw the protestors, a number of who broke away from the anti-war events to hear from many of the country's notable authors. But the festival still seemed worlds apart from the other big event less than a mile away. more ›

What a weekend to be in Washington. No doubt we'll be seeing a whole lot of you around the Mall for one event or another this weekend. DCist would like to take this opportunity to recommend sunscreen with a high SPF. We just can't have all our readers looking like lobsters come Monday morning. Not a sexy look. FRIDAY: >> The D.C. music scene says farewell to Q and Not U tonight at Black Cat.... more ›

-obsessed young ones? Ready your little girls. more ›

From Rock Creek Rambler, we are reminded that Jessica Cutler, aka(fka?) Washingtonienne (the fallen Capitol Hill intern/entrepreneur-turned-blogstar-turned-author from the last year's intern season) is still around. And her book -- "The Washingtonienne: A Novel" (Hyperion Books) -- is on Amazon! Rock Creek Rambler says that those who have already purchased Ms. Cutler's book fall in the same demographic that have purchased books like "XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits" by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; "I Am Charlotte Simmons" by... more ›

A building nobody loved imploded Saturday morning. The old Washington Convention Center, situated between New York Avenue, H, Ninth and 11th streets in Northwest, is no more. Well not exactly. Though the majority of the center and most of its New York Avenue facade fell in on itself, the H Street facade remains standing. This DCist took a quick walk-around Saturday night to gawk at the post-destruction and snapped this photo from 11th Street (We aren't sure if the blast pushed the street lamp off its base or if it was already like that.). Roof trusses are collapsed inward, bricks litter the closed-off sidewalks. The giant loading dock doors on New York Avenue open up to fractured concrete and clear sky. It looks like, almost, a truck-bombed building in Baghdad, just a few blocks from the White House. There is still a lot of demolition to get done. (On an interesting side note, the implosion was used to test first responder communication transmissions as part of a government program to improve search and rescue techniques.) more ›

On a recent red-eye flight back to Reagan National, DCist picked up Tom Wolfe's latest novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons." Ever the reporter, Wolfe's novel aims to do for the college experience what "A Man in Full" did for corporate Atlanta and "The Bonfire of the Vanities" did for '80s New York. DCist was hoping to chat with Wolfe about his work (and his fashion), but we won't be able to make his 12:30 p.m.... more ›