Howard Kurtz’s WaPo column today concerns the kerfuffle over Tim Page’s angry email to Ward 8 Council Member Marion Barry’s office that we told you about yesterday. As you’ll recall, Page, who writes about classical music for the Post, received an unsolicited press release from Barry’s office about the city’s deal with Specialty Hospitals of America to purchase the Greater Southeast Community Hospital. Page then fired off an angry email in which he called the…

The Hill is reporting that the Senate Hart and Dirksen Office Buildings were evacuated due to a fire just after 1 p.m. There are at least four fire trucks and an ambulance at the scene as hundreds of aides left the buildings. Senate staffers told The Hill that this was not a planned drill, though it is unclear why fire and rescue personnel were called. “Evacuating hart & dirksen due to confirmed fire & audible…

As part of our continuing efforts to make the Gothamist network a friendly and reasonably polite place, we’ve now, as of this morning, eliminated “guest” comments on our posts. This means that to comment on DCist and any other -ist site, all users will need to complete a short registration process. A note about privacy: the new system does require a working email address to complete registration. It does not require you to share your…

Having failed to make their intended satire clear to the George Washington University campus, seven students felt the need to come forward late last night to take responsibility for those “anti-Muslim” posters we told you about yesterday. The Hatchet published parts of the letter after receiving it last night. Among the seven students who admitted their involvement was ubiquitous IVAW poster boy and current GWU graduate student Adam Kokesh. “It is to our great dismay…

Okay, so we’ve already given Brooklyn’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah a less than stellar live review and sufficiently curbed our enthusiasm when they announced two November dates at the Rock and Roll Hotel. Fortunately for the band, our lukewarm opinions hardly affected their ticket sales, as both dates have been sold out for weeks. Unfortunately for fans of the band (including some DCist staffers), the dates were so popular that both were actually oversold,…

>> Ward 8 Council member Marion Barry feels “disrespected and misled” by Mayor Adrian Fenty regarding the changes the administration made to the development of Poplar Point, where plans for a new stadium for D.C. United have now been abandoned. [WTOP] >> The accused “D.C. Madam,” Deborah Jeane Palfrey, is alleging that national security concerns related to the fact that Muslim men used her escort service before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks might…

Photo and review by DCist contributor Valerie Paschall Atlanta psych-noise rockers Deerhunter may have built a reputation over the past year for shocking their live audiences, but last week the band seemed visibly shaken. The previous night, guitarist Colin Mee departed the group, making Thursday their first show in several years as a quartet. This shift in the band’s chemistry was the latest in a string of personal and public relations disasters in the past…

Via the Examiner, we learn that a new ranking put out by Dulles-based AOL places Washington, D.C. as the “most email addicted” city in the country, beating out the likes of Atlanta, New York, San Francisco and Houston, which all placed in the top five. The prevalence of mobile email devices such as Blackberries and Sidekicks in the city was attributed to the result, as well as the large number of government employees, most of…

Regular readers probably noticed that we’ve made a few small changes to our commenting and feedback systems today. Here’s the low down: 1. Every commenter can now have a profile page that includes a small bit of information about them, links to their recent comments, and comments other people have left in response. If the commenter is also a DCist author, the page will include a list of their recent posts. Here’s mine. You can…

Even before our scatterbrained, ADHD world began over-prescribing Ritalin, we giggled at Steven Wright’s one-liners on SNL during the ‘80s. If you’re like us, maybe you even stayed up late into the night listening to albums like I Have a Pony. His brand of comedy, as something of an intellectual punster, appealed to us as kids just as much as it does today. Jokes like, “I was walking in the woods all by myself. A…