Color us honored! When we thumbed through the massive, two-lb. "Best Of D.C." edition of this week's Washington City Paper, we were surprised and delighted to find that publication's readers had awarded us "Best D.C. Web Site." Best locally-focused blog, OK, but best web site? Washingtonpost.com was a runner up? Allow all of us here at DCist HQ to deliver a collective "gee golly." That was just awfully nice of you, City Paper readers. Make......

Since we didn't witness it ourselves, the above is a representation of the City Paper's Matthew Borlik's impassioned and rageful rant against one -- or all -- of the District's drivers. A key passage (though don't let it stop you from reading the whole thing): So it is for you, the stupid car-owning resident of Washington, D.C., that I write this blog entry—as well as those that will inevitably follow it as I continue......

The Washington City Paper's Angela Valdez provides a two-pronged update today to the monstrosity that could be the Late Night Shots reality TV show we told you about earlier this month. In a piece over at Campus Progress, she interviews Havva Eisenbaum, the producer of the pilot, who says that they've already had "nibbles of interest from networks" who might end up picking it up once the pilot is completed. Considering how many reality TV......

Happy Christmas Eve, Washington. With the frenzy of last-minute shopping and travel out of the city largely complete, folks staying here for the holiday are being treated to a quieter, gentler D.C. than normal, and it turns out in more ways than one. Over the weekend the Post took a look at a recent decline in the murder rate, reporting that only nine homicides have been logged in the District in the 37 days since......

Last week a little dose of relief came to the city's art lovers and critics, as the National Gallery of Art announced they've filled the position to head up their department of modern art, vacant for around six months now. Harry Cooper comes to the NGA from the Harvard University Art Museums, and Washington City Paper's Jeffry Cudlin does a good job putting it in perspective. In other museum news, camera-in-cell-phone technology is officially history.......

>> Don't forget: thousands of dirty hippies and the gun-toting maniacs who hate them are getting together for a big ol' hootenanny down on the National Mall tomorrow morning. It's the War on War on War. >> At the Washington City Paper, editorial assistants who make mistakes aren't just named, they're taken out back and tortured with one million paper cuts using the latest issue while Erik Wemple screams "you're not good enough to......

FRIDAY: >> Tired of putting those great costume ideas on the back burner till October? Dying for a chance to wear a costume without wearing a jacket over top? Three Stars vets New Rock Church of Fire feel the same way. Tonight, join NRCOF, D.C.'s The Gaskets and Richmond's The Invisibles at the Rock & Roll Hotel for July-O-Ween. Incognito fun, rip roaring rock from all three bands, DJ sets, drink specials, a costume contest......

Via Editor & Publisher, the Washington City Paper, along with the Chicago Reader, which the City Paper owns, has been sold to Atlanta-based company Creative Loafing, publisher of four other alternative weeklies in Atlanta, Tampa, Sarasota, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C. The City Paper name will remain in place, despite the other four papers all carrying the "Creative Loafing" name. In a post to the City Paper's staff blog, City Desk, Senior Editor Mike DeBonis said......

>> Vandals armed only with a U-shaped bicycle lock and a sense of irony managed to trap about 40 commuters on the Virginia Railway Express Monday near Woodbridge, when they locked the metal gates from the pedestrian bridge at the Rippon station. The gates, which the VRE removed Tuesday, were originally put there to keep vandals out of the station. [AP via NBC4] >> Post columnist Courtland Milloy makes a compelling case for abolishing......

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......

Earlier this week we heard some terrible news for one of our favorite venues in the city. Warehouse Arts Complex, located on the developing 7th Street corridor near the Convention Center, was greeted with a property tax bill over 500% what they paid last year. The concert venue, art gallery, theater, screening room, and cafe/bar serves the arts community in more ways than any location outside the Kennedy Center, but this kind of work isn't......

>> After a wet, gray day, we're happy to report the sun is peeking through and you can probably skip the "standing at the front door and debating whether to bring an umbrella" part of the evening. Enjoy! >> Apparently, being a crime scene investigator in Washington isn't all about having shiny shiny hair and zipping around town in a Hummer H-2. The city can't seem to hold on to their crime lab techs.......

Last week the Washington City Paper unveiled a redesign featuring "more color and a new convenient size." Paper pushers were even out in force at several Metro stations pimping the new look. Once we got our hands on the issue though, these lofty promises fell a bit flat. Their Web site redesign early this year got our nod of approval, but after some thought the print edition has no such luck. The paper certainly delivers......

Cue sounds of cats hissing at each other. The latest issue of the Washington City Paper contains not one but two tongue lashings of Ward 1 D.C. Council member Jim Graham. The first, a lengthy cover story by Jessica Gould, nicely summarized in the subtitle: "Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham never met a misbehaving nightclub that blanket legislation couldn’t fix," details Graham's latest crusade against nightclubs -- an issue we've certainly talked about before.......

Clearly, the District is tired of being referred to as "Hollywood for Ugly People." Instead, we'd like to be called "Hollywood for Ugly People Who Also Pay for Sex." The Washington Times has the latest on a bomb of salacious gossip that may be about to go off in our fair city. For some background, The Smoking Gun first talked about the case back in October. It's hard to know whether to be worried or......

It seems that the folks over at the Washington City Paper have made good on what has become a yearly resolution -- to play catch-up with the rest of online world. Late Friday the City Paper debuted its brand new website, the second overhaul in as many years. While last year's upgrades were meant to bring the weekly's online presence out of the late 1990s, this year's round of fixes has brought about a more......

>> The Politico breaks into D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's family home, and what do they turn up? Twenty cases of Gillette Mach-3 razors, a box of replacement Blackberry chargers and a picture of Fenty in his younger and hairier days. [The Politico] >> Investigators have confirmed that the deaths of two area teens, whose bodies were discovered on Friday, were acts of suicide. [WTOP/AP] >> Tomorrow is the day that area minors and all-age venues......

What do you do when you, the dutiful copy editor, is are forced to adhere to an in-house style that flies in the face of the rules of grammar you hold in such high esteem? You blog about it. Andrew Beaujon, the City Paper's Copy Editor, seems to have had enough. In a witheringly comical post he published on the paper's blog yesterday, Beaujon takes issue with the "serial comma." He writes: I hate the......

FRIDAY: >> We interviewed Josh Lefkowitz when he was in town performing at the Fringe Festival, and now he's bringing his thoughtful/hysterical monologue, Help Wanted: A Personal Search for Meaningful Employment at the Start of the 21st Century, to the Woolly Mammoth stage. Tickets are $15, and the show runs through Oct. 8. Details and showtimes are available here. >> Soft Complex has a debut EP, Barcelona, and it's damn well time for them to......

It was a week ago that the Washington City Paper joined the blogosphere, kicking off their staff blog, City Desk. Since then, they have posted on politics, media, fashion, theater and even kicked off their own question-and-answer feature, "The 'Huh?' Bub." But unlike the Post's Metro reporters, who have admitted to DCist that blogging on D.C. Wire is an "annoyance," the City Paper's staff seems to be enjoying the newfound online medium. Wrote Senior Editor......

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......

If you couldn’t get down to New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras properly, look no further than Warehouse. The gallery is currently hosting Arty Gras, an exhibition to celebrate artists displaced by Hurricane Katrina and raise funds for the Habitat for Humanity Gulf Coast recovery efforts. The exhibition was organized by independent curator Beth Baldwin, who grabbed onto the idea after seeing offers of gallery space for artists whose shows were canceled after the storm.......

We awoke this morning to a new and shocking sight -- the Washington City Paper, the District's godfather of alternative press, had redone their website. And not a minute too early, we might add. The City Paper's website was always, to put it mildly, stuck in 1998. Such an online presentation was a clear injustice to what was otherwise good writing, quirky features, and solid alternative journalism. The paper's new site is brighter, sharper, and......

Of all the touchy topics we write about, one business is consistantly able to stoke the passion of our readers more than any other: Warren Brown's CakeLove. Our previous posts about the rapidly growing U Street business have sparked heated controversy. Some of you like the cake, others think he's overpriced or overrated, while still others have decidedly more negative opinions. Our approach is nuanced -- while some of us enjoy his products, others have......

Just two days after the announcement that Garrett Graff was joining the Washingtonian as Editor-at-Large, it has been announced that Todd Kliman, award-winning food writer for the Washington City Paper, has been named Dining Editor for the city's monthly glossy. According to Don Rockwell, Kliman will hav[e] editorial control over the upcoming Best 100 Restaurants and Cheap Eats issues. Thomas Head and Cynthia Hacinli will remain at the Washingtonian and work with Todd, who will......

Now Gothamist can feel our pain and horror: they've had their first sighting of a snakehead fish in a lake in Queens.Last month, biologists with New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation were doing a routine sampling of the fish in the brackish water at Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens when, to their horror, they found a northern snakehead fish, then another and another until they had five, including one monster 28......

Tired of chronicling your dating misadventures for only the handful of friends who read your Live Journal? Ready to make your sexploits public? Are you living the single life and schooled in the ways of Movable Type? Well, we think the City Paper would like a word with you. The weekly recently posted a "help wanted" ad for a Dating Blogger,someone to post (anonymously? or not?) about their every hook up, metro crush and wretched......

So the Pope-watch late last week distracted us from keeping an eye on neighborhood news. We'll do a quick summay. Forgive our tardiness. First off, Loose Lips in the Washington City Paper is massively confused about Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham. The lede says it all: "You can count on one thing from Ward 1 D.C. Councilmember Jim Graham: He's a tough guy to count on." From supporting to opposing Mayor Williams' take-over of the......

Inspired by their successful Crafty Bastards Fair last September, the Washington City Paper has launched a "Crafty Bastards" section to their classified section where you can satiate your desire for handknit wine totes, homemade dog treats, hand made jewelry, "one of a kind miniature shoes." One of the advertisers is Kathleen Shafer's listing for her D.C. flag t-shirts. Since we purchased one last fall, Ms. Shafer has expanded the line to include new styles and......

The Washington City Paper's Department of Media column was interested to find out where the new Washington Examiner delivered. So they called 274 advisory neighborhood commissioners (receiving responses from 119) and scouted around town a bit. What did they find? According to the survey, majority-black neighborhoods are lucky to get even spotty service. The paper's red plastic missives tend to land in exclusively white neighborhoods, with a some exceptions here and there. (Cleveland Park, for......