Ticket holders for Saturday's Wizards v. Raptors match up probably made their purchases with visions of Gilbert Arenas and Chris Bosh dancing in their head. With both stars injured for the game, instead it turned into the Roger Mason Jr. v. Jason Kapono show. It turns out this wasn't a bad thing at all. After not playing at all in Thursday's loss in Philadelphia, Mason Jr. came off the bench to score 15 big......

Since trading away team leader and expert benchwarmer Brian Sutherby to save money and cure a losing streak, the Caps have chalked up two more uninspired losses to teams from subtropical climatic zones. Last night's nominal crowd at Verizon Center cheered optimistically when the Caps lobbed soft shots from the blueline into the catching glove of Atlanta's third-string goalie, Johan Hedberg. They cheered sarcastically when Capitals museum piece Olaf Kolzig stopped easy shots. Some fans......

It's getting hard to keep track of what to think about the Capitals this year. At the beginning of the year, they won three straight games, and even spent an hour as the league's first place team. Then they lost a few, won one, and tried losing again. Last night, in what should have been a hopeless battle against a hot team, they put together a seven to one victory over the grammatically challenged......

We love this video of Toronto FC fans heading to the game on Metro from YouTube. Despite their crushing defeat at the hands of D.C. United Saturday night, the visiting fans showed a lot of moxie. As the DCenters note, boisterous TFC fans came en masse to support their club:TFC fans: The expansion club's supporters are the gem of the league and to see (we actually heard them first; we were in the ramp......

Saturday night's meeting of D.C. United and Toronto FC looked like a mismatch on paper. An expansion team with the worst record in Major League Soccer lined up against the most decorated club in the league's history and current point leaders. Add D.C.'s distinctive home field advantage and you have a recipe for a blowout. Yet for one half, TFC hung with their hosts. Indeed, at many points in the first half Toronto was the......

The morning after seeing Toronto’s Metric, I had a brief water-cooler conversation with a co-worker who had caught the band the last time they rolled through town. “I've always been surprised how quickly that band blew up,” he said. “It seems like they got huge almost overnight.” I nodded in agreement, having seen them fill a 1,200-capacity club the night prior. After giving the matter some thought, however, I realized that Metric’s rise to the......

LAist was comped front row seats by the Dodgers due to Malingering being struck by a foul ball last week, and she came back with some great photos, and earlier made fun of 4th of July on Venice Beach. But the biggest stories of the week was that the Mayor's Hot Tamale was revealed, and that a Kwik-E-Mart was erected in Burbank. Phillyist was busy doing the Fourth of July up right, exercising their......

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......

The Wizards and Capitals are on summer vacation. The only Redskins news prominently features Ron Mexico and is not related to sports at all (well, human sports anyway). Despite these non-developments, this weekend has some intriguing aspects regarding actual Washington sports. >> Boxing comes to the District as the brothers Peterson square off in co-featured bouts at the D.C. Armory. Lamont and Anthony Peterson are a combined 42-0 with 25 knockouts between them. Anthony will......

Yesterday we attended the press preview for next month's 5th annual SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival and got a sneak peak at a few of the documentary films that will be making their Washington area (and in some cases World or North American) premieres at the Silver Spring festival in June. DCist will be covering the festival once again this year, but in the meantime we thought we'd share a handful of the 100 announced......

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......

What was once an entertaining season for the Washington Wizards has quickly gone down the proverbial drain so fast most people are afraid to ask "What's next?" In the last 12 days, the team has lost Caron Butler and Gilbert Arenas for the season, lost the third seed in the Eastern Conference playoff picture, lost the Southeast Division crown to the Miami Heat and also lost six in a row, with four of those......

A tumultuous weekend for the Washington Wizards took an unexpected turn for the worse on Sunday when All-Star Caron Butler fractured his right hand in a 121-107 win against the Milwaukee Bucks. Bulter was trying to contest a dunk by Ruben Patterson and hit his hand on the backboard. His availability for the rest of the regular season and the playoffs is very much in doubt at this point. "Caron is going to be......

Two games after we suggested the Washington Capitals were trying to lose games for better draft position, the team has won back to back games against teams fighting for playoff spots by a combined score of twelve goals to two. In home games on Friday night and Sunday afternoon, the Caps cakewalked over the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Tampa Bay Lightning, and climbed from twenty-seventh place all the way back to twenty-fifth in the......

Due to losses in their previous two match ups, the Wizards were obviously fired up for the Atlantic Division leading Toronto Raptors last night, which was a good thing because it seemed like everyone else - the somewhat sparse crowd, the media, the dance team, G-Wiz - was uninterested and unimpressed. Perhaps they were all suffering from a little seasonal depression or fearful of the latest oncoming snowpocalypse. No matter the cause, the Wizards......

Frederic Cassivi looked extremely confident in goal last night as he helped the Capitals maintain dignity through a three to zero loss at Toronto that could have been much worse. Cassivi preserved a scoreless tie with solid, calm, positional goaltending through twenty-three minutes of play in spite of receiving a dirty slash to the back of his helmet from notorious goon Darcy Tucker, who was immediately knocked to the ice by stalwart Caps defenseman John......

In case you didn't hear, tonight's the night. Unbuckled. Pela. These United States. DC9, 9 p.m. You'll thank us later. >> A few local leaders are agitating for new incentives for filmmakers to shoot their movies in the District. Sure, we've all been sitting in the theater and seen everywhere from Baltimore to Toronto masquerading as our city, but are folks willing to balance their desire for studio cash with the irrepressible urge to bitch......

Satomi Matsuzaki has been known to perform zipped up in a sleeping bag, or, in the band’s early years, in an orange bear costume. So it’s telling that the Deerhoof frontwoman took the stage last night in an all-black shirt, jeans, and boots ensemble. Could this be a confirmation of the reviewers’ buzz that the madcap noise-rock trio’s latest album, Friend Opportunity, was less oblique, more accessible, than past releases? It’s true that in recent......

D.C. United announced its MLS schedule yesterday, and we'll cut to the chase: you have exactly 183 days before David Beckham comes to Washington. He'll be here on August 9 for a Thursday night game, but unless you're planning to buy a full season ticket package, tickets won't be available until July 2. And that goes for half-season and flex plans too -- the August 9 match against Beckham's LA Galaxy (formerly known as......

Between fake terrorist alerts and scandals big and small, this just might be the Best Best of the -ists ever. We're exhausted just thinking about it. First up, SFist, who saw their little 'ole site be the center of what was a nice little scandal (even getting their editor on TV) only to find their scandal dwarfed by the even bigger scandal caused by their Mayor boffing one of his aides' wife. We're not......

The Wizards 104-99 win over the Detroit Pistons last night at the Verizon Center evened the season series to 2-2, solidified D.C.'s grip on the top spot in the Eastern Conference, and has rendered it extremely probable that Eddie Jordan will coach the East's All-Star Team in Vegas. Good news all around then, except for the small matter of Antawn Jamison re-injuring the left knee he tweaked playing Boston on January 20th. Jamison suffered......

Can it get any better for Gilbert Arenas right now? The Wiz may have lost at Toronto yesterday, but if you've been paying attention, that was almost inevitable after the week Gilbert (and the team) just had. It started early last week when Arenas was named Player of the Month for December. It continued on Wednesday when Agent Hibachi scored the game winner as the buzzer sounded against budding rival Milwaukee. On Friday he......

Happy Holidays! Chances are, you're reading this the day after Christmas, back at your day job after all-too-short a holiday, and the last thing you want from us is stuff about the holidays. But that's just too bad. Because, see, here in the Ist-A-Verse, we do things ahead of time. It might be December 26 for you, but that's what you get for not checking your Favorite Local Blog on Christmas Eve. Austinist is......

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Londonist wants you to know where to......

Aligning Minds create soundscapes. Their atmospheric music evokes isolated locales, rainy nights in the city, frost covered fields in the early morning sun. At the show we caught, Aligning Minds didn't need to create a locale so much as to enhance it -- the work was already done for them in the leaking and chilly fourth floor at Love on a drizzly Wednesday night. Introduced to this electronic live performance duo by innovative local promoter......

On Tuesday, the American -ists will be celebrating democracy and hitting the polls, letting politicians know what they really think. It just made us wonder: if it were up to the -ist-a-verse, what would we be voting for? Londonist votes for better skincare, alternative spaces for art, cute little birds and the men who keep them, and concrete. Lots of concrete. Shanghaiist votes for one of the Bee Gees and Air Supply (it's a double-ticket),......

Let's take a look back at a week that raised this Zen koan: if Kevin Federline got into a wrestling ring with a wrestler, who would you root for? Austinist was in an entertainment state of mind as they covered the dickens out of the Austin Film Festival, depicted all the Big 12 football coaches as South Park characters, and interviewed Jose Gonzalez. Chicagoist talked about the passion as they bid adieu to Bell's Beer,......

As fall settles in and another calendar page gets turned, thoughts turn from bbq's and vacations to holidays and the realization that '06 is coming to an end. With all that going on, with change in the air, we wonder what is it that made that makes the -ists ponder? Phillyist is concerned that the war on Trans fats could affect it's beloved cheese steak sandwiches, something for which we should all be concerned. They......

If it weren't for our life as an -ist, we're not sure we'd ever leave our apartment. Fortunately, to fully -ist, one must seek out the new, the fresh, and the unknown. Brand new, or just new to us, that's what we're all about this week. Phillyist keeps it fresh by getting a new motto, learning to prioritize, and taking in an experimental indie rock show. Torontoist does their first post in franglais, gets ready......

Former Maryalnd Terp and Silver Spring native Lonny Baxter was arrested by Secret Service agents early this morning after witnesses reported hearing shots fired from a sport-utility vehicle near the White House. Baxter's SUV was stopped near the intersection of 17th and I streets NW where officers found a handgun and spent casings inside his vehicle. Baxter, along with fellow passenger Irvin Martin, was charged with carrying a pistol without a license, having unregistered......