Think you’ve got a better slogan than “Celebrate and Discover” to describe our fair city? Chances are you do and the D.C. Convention & Tourism Corporation wants to hear it. They’ve launched a new campaign to find out what we Washingtonians think makes the city great. Over at Share Your DC you can take a quick survey asking what you think are the city’s greatest people, places and events along with advice you’d give to…

While D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty officially pays tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today at the University of the District of Columbia, one question comes to mind — how well has the District actually guarded and promoted King’s legacy? Given the state of a library and an avenue named after the famed civil rights fighter, not too well. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library stands as a contradiction at the corner of Ninth…

It isn’t easy being the District. While we District residents pride ourselves on living in a city that is diverse and dynamic, the rest of the country tends to lump us together with the federal government that shares our geographic space. Call it guilt by association — Congress wastes money and the president lies, and suddenly everyone who lives within the city limits has something to do with federal excesses and excuses. This couldn’t be…

About 15,000 people (though it felt like many more) got all dolled up Saturday night and headed to the Washington Convention Center for Mayor Adrian Fenty’s Inaugural ball, and DCist was there to capture the revelry. Once we got inside, that is. Along with thousands of other Ball attendees, we were packed in like so many sardines near the entrance to the exhibit hall for over 30 minutes before we finally squeezed through what turned…

In recent years, various neighborhood listservs have popped up across the District, serving as hyper-local sounding boards and electronic community forums. There’s NewHillEast, WoodleyFriends, cleveland-park, HillcrestDC, AdamsMorgan, columbia heights, FriendsOfSligoCreek, gloverpark, MPD-1D — you get the idea. So much commentary is exchanged on these many listservs that the City Paper’s blog, City Desk, has taken to publishing twice-weekly excerpts of the best and weirdest that gets exchanged. But one new listserv is looking to fight…

In D.C.’s own rendition of manifest destiny, our suburbs seem to be expanding with all the vigor of well-watered kudzu. It’s how DCist imagines the old horror standard The Blob, if it were retold by John Cheever: the mucilaginous mass slowly gorges on pastoral countryside, dusty antique shops, and quaint Main Streets, leaving only Bed, Bath, and Beyond in its wake. While taking a look at the political implications of these population shifts, the Post…

If you’ve ever browsed Craigslist housing ads, you’ve invariably seen those bizarro room share ads – random, extremely cheap prices ($261/mo), strange symbols in the text (۞), questionable grammar and capitalization, and generic email addresses (usually the name of a European country followed by some numbers). The ads all sound about the same, the houses (or whatever they are) always seem to be in Silver Spring or upper 16th Street, and they offer a free…

Just when you thought you could escape politics, even briefly, in our fair city, there’s a new menace lurking: the subversive marketing of yet another set of political trading cards. It happened on Monday, when exiting the Dupont Metro. The perfect storm of heels, gum and litter had left me with a little present. Further inspection revealed it to be a small piece of cardboard with an illustration of George W. Bush, surrounded by flames…

It’s coming. In just over two months, the District’s bars will go smoke-free. Once the smokers are banished to the sidewalks outside their favorite watering holes, the District will have joined 18 states and 474 municipalities that have done the same. It was at the start of this year the D.C. Council definitively endorsed legislation mandating that bars and restaurants snuff out the smokers; the restaurants did so this April, and the bars will follow…

What was the hullabaloo at Ben’s Chili Bowl last night? Sources tell us it was a video for Capitol Records artist J. Holiday, an R&B singer from D.C. determined to rep his city on screen. Passersby report they got the cold shoulder from the video shoot’s official sidewalk blocker and were sent car-dodging into U Street to get around. From DCist Andrew: Andrew: “What’s going on?” Sidewalk Lady: “What does it look like!?” Andrew:…