Results tagged “townhall”

              

By DCist Contributor Ryan J. Reilly

Fun Fun Fun Fest 2007 Recap from Super!Alright! on Vimeo. Austinist attended a town hall meeting about proposed noise ordinances that could undermine the city's future as the Live Music Capital of the World, and lamented the possible loss of Texas's only feminist bookstore. Throughout the week, they interviewed a bunch of indie fashion designers and D-I-Y websites—Etsy, Ornamental Things, 31 Corn Lane, and Aorta Designs—for the upcoming Stitch Fashion Show. They also did...

Good morning, Washington. The city is still reeling from the news that the U.S. Attorney's Office has indicted two employees from the District's Office of Tax and Revenue on charges of embezzling over $16 million. It's a staggering sum, and the Post cites officials who are calling it the largest theft ever uncovered in local government in the Washington area. The two women, Harriette Walters and Diane Gustus, are said to have used the money...

Mark your calendars: WMATA put out a release earlier today announcing the dates of a series of six public meetings at which you can voice your opinions about the proposed Metro fare hikes, which would go into effect in January. The full set of proposed increases is here, but the basics include raising the base fare of Metrorail from $1.35 to $1.65, keep bus fares the same as long as you use SmarTrip cards (add...

In their coverage of the Capital Pride Festival, which kicked off yesterday and will culminate in a parade and street festival this weekend, the Post gives an account of a town hall meeting on GLBT issues last night at Studio Theatre where Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) said he plans to introduce a bill legalizing gay marriage in the District within the next two years. Graham appeared on the panel with several other openly...

The D.C. council is set to vote on legislation proposed by Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) tomorrow that would create exemptions to allow strip clubs displaced by the new Nationals stadium to relocate to Ivy City in Ward 5. As we told you previously, Ward 5 Council member Harry Thomas opposes the legislation and has offered several amendments to the bill, including one that was adopted that would give $3.6 million to improve the...

>> We still haven't reached the end of the fire hydrant fiasco, it seems. Turns out that when WASA completed an inventory of more than 9,000 fire hydrants, they realized the city's hydrants are made by nine to ten different manufacturers -- a situation which could mean that if neighboring fire departments like Montgomery, Prince George's and Fairfax counties, which all use a standard hydrant, are dispatched to help fight a blaze, they could...

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. Torontoist Special Report: Rosie to Trump: "Fire 300 Bicyclists for Fraud!" On DCist: Students Go Wild for Slogans, Secrets and Sexual Harassment The action was thick...

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into...

After six years of adding to the eclectic flavor of the intersection of 18th and Florida NW, word comes to us this week that Staccato is closing its doors forever next month. Staccato has always sort of been the Little Club That Could, hosting aspiring musicians from a variety of genres in its no-frills, teeny, converted-townhouse venue.

You don’t have to be a recently-disgraced member of the U.S. Congress to be a little freaked out about what breadcrumbs you’re leaving as you schlep around the World Wide Web. They can pretty easily be gathered and presto – you’re an instant demographic target, with preferences and interests neatly catalogued. Aside from whatever skeletons we’d like to keep safely tucked away in our closets, you can color us curious as to what our tastes...

If you follow the comments on this site at all, you've probably noticed that one of the topics that stirs up much digital debate is Metro. Be they lovers or haters, DCist readers love to complain about it, compare it to systems in other cities (especially New York), suggest ways to improve it, etc., etc. Well, here's your chance to take your comments offline and address them to someone who can actually do something about...

Some people in the D.C. area pride themselves on their ability to decode the wealth of acronyms that substitute for the English language in our nation's capital. Others have no tolerance for the labyrinth of words that make the underlying BS of corporate-speak sound sweet. And you know what? We love those people.

In wanting to further refine his ability to predict what new music might appeal to you based on your current tastes, Tim Westergren, founder of the amazing streaming music service Pandora.com has spent the spring traversing the U.S. hosting town hall-style meetings to discover new and legendary artists and sounds at the grass roots level, taking in local venues and bands along the way. For the curious of the lot, Pandora is the webcast interface of the Music Genome Project, Westergren’s 10,000+ artist database which has rated over 100,000 songs drawing from all genres based on 400 different musical attributes such as tempo, instrumentation and vocal styles. Using this database, Westergren created an algorithm which takes your music preferences and returns other artists in the database with similar musical qualities (hear Tim describe how Pandora works in this podcast interview courtesy of TWiT.tv). So, if you’re a big Barry Manilow fan, Pandora can help you find other artists featuring blues influences, jazz influences, demanding vocal performances, acoustic sonority, and major key tonality to take you to your happy place.

Today's Opinionist comes to DCist from local art blogger Kriston Capps. For all this time, D.C. Mayor Williams has billed himself as a supporter of big boxes in the District. During yesterday’s town hall meeting to discuss the fate of the city’s public library system, the Mayor revealed himself to be no friend to our most notorious big box—the Mies Van der Rohe-designed Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. And he made no new friends...

It was on December 8 that Washington Times Metro columnist Tom Knott used his perch to describe an ongoing feud between Town Hall, a new and upscale watering hole in Glover Park, and the bar's neighbors. It was also in this infamous column that Knott described the stretch of Wisconsin Avenue where Town Hall has set up shop as a "red-light district" and, even more poetically, as such: ...a fading commercial strip that features two...

We often flip through the Washington Times, sometimes for some comic relief, sometimes to see how the conservative newspaper views local news. In perusing its pages today, we came across a column written by Tom Knott, the Times' answer to the Post's well-known and well-liked Metro columnist Marc Fisher. Today Knott -- often known for taking some creative license with his writing -- describes a conflict between a neighborhood bar and residents who want it...

Yes dear reader, you read right. For the simple task of spending seven hours tomorrow discussing how to create a "long-range vision" for the city in the areas of youth development, employment opportunities, the public library system, and affordable housing, the mayor will provide you with free food and entertainment and the chance to engage in some good old fashioned curmudgeonly public policy debate.

Good morning, Washington. Today will be mostly cloudy and chilly - highs in the 60s. Matthew Bradley posted this photo to DCist photos, taken at the Dalai Lama's talk yesterday at the MCI Center. The W. Times has a short story about the talk where they report the 1-hour talk was on "compassion". Did you attend? What else did the Tibetan leader speak on?

Good morning, Washington. Today it will be partly cloudy with a 30 percent chance of rain, so be prepared. Flickr user birdcage from Missives from the Birdcage posted this photo of the Prince George's County Fair to DCist photos. We are getting excited for our first birthday party tomorrow at Stetson's - will we see you there? Cost of Living Rises in Area: Yesterday we reported and analyzed the news that affordable housing in the...

For the sake of not having to write separate posts for all these different yet interesting events, here is a list of some things you may not want to miss in the area this week.

August's last weekend has come and gone. We hope you spent it well. We know we did, and we didn't even get to everything we had planned. The photo was snapped by Melissa during Saturday's rain showers. Nothing compared to Category 5 Katrina bearing down on New Orleans as we type. Capital Weather is keeping everyone updated. If you have friends or family in Katrina's path, please encourage them to stay safe and evacuate. This...

We were pleasantly surprised when we were invited to the "soft" opening of Town Hall, a new restaurant in Glover Park at 2218 Wisconsin Avenue. The location is seen to the left earlier this summer, before the remodeling. Back in May we had written about the difficulty of the owners to secure an extension of their liquor license. After some carefully lobbying of the neighborhood ANC by the restaurateurs - and an increasingly vocal lobby in favor of the business organized through the neighborhood Yahoo Group - the ANC voted to temporarily extend the hours for a trial period.

Judging by the titanic commenting slugfests that our previous posts on the reincarnation of the D.C. smoking ban have provoked, Councilmember Jim Graham may have quite a meeting on his hands tomorrow. That's because he's hosting a town hall meeting at the Lincoln Theater tomorrow at 7 p.m. Although his website doesn't contain much information about what attendees can expect at the event, we do love how they painstakingly link to the websites of all...

The proposed closing hours for a new restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue in Glover Park has upset a few of the neighborhood's residents. A group of investors are currently remodeling the former location of Saveur Restaurant, 2218 Wisconsin Ave. (between W and Hall places), for a new "family-style" restaurant called Town Hall. (The image is from Saveur's Amazon listing) All was going smoothly for the group until some residents got wind the group was hoping to extend Saveur's liquor license from 11:30 until 2 a.m. on weekdays and 3 a.m. on weekends.

WMATA is planning to hold their second-ever town hall meeting tomorrow, April 12, at George Mason High School in Falls Church from 6 to 9 p.m. The school is about one half-mile from the West Falls Church Metro and they say there'll be WMATA employees on hand to point you in the right direction. Their first public town hall meeting drew an overflow crowd to Metro's downtown headquarters. It's not clear what (if any) concrete results came from the meeting, but it initiated a public dialogue and certainly brought some problems to the attention of WMATA's leadership. (You can read the transcript here.) The first town hall sparked a follow-up story in the Post based on one question from the public which revealed none of the current sitting WMATA board members ride Metro regularly.

A school bus carrying about 30 students careened off a road in Prince George's County this morning. The accident scene is seen to the right in this NBC4 photo. The Post reports none of the passengers were seriously hurt, as "everyone on board walked away with little more than bumps, bruises and jangled nerves," although NBC4 reports "students hit the windows and went flying over seats." The accident was apparently caused when the driver of the bus was distracted while talking on her cell phone, and NBC4 reported the school district had issued regulations that "discourage" bus drivers from talking on cell phones but not banning it.

New WMATA Chairman Wants Rider Input: We can hear applause somewhere. WMATA's new board chairman, Dana Kauffman, says that he wants the system to be accountable to the riders who use it and is proposing many new external relations efforts that will boost the weight of rider's input into upper-level decisions regarding the transit system. The Post reports that these efforts will include a riders' advisory board, public comments at WMATA board meetings, regular town...

High winds yesterday caused some power outages, and caused this house under construction near Howard University to collapse. Today will be mostly sunny with highs in the 50s. (The photo is Courtesy of D.C. Fire and EMS, via the AP.) Metro Board Doesn't Ride Metro: Following up on an issue raised during last month's first-ever town hall meeting, the Post has investigated just how much each member of the WMATA Board of Directors used...

Good morning, Washington. There may be some rain moving into the area, so don't forget your umbrella. Temperatures will be in the 50s approaching 60 degrees. Owners Delay Expos Vote: In a vote that was to officially seal the deal that would bring the Montreal Expos to Washington, baseball owners in Chicago have delayed their vote, the AP, via WJLA, reports. The Post reports that the deal is not in any danger of faltering considering...