“SXSL is, at its heart, a call to action,” said Obama.

You can nominate yourself or a friend to attend South by South Lawn.

On Saturday, the White House threw open its gates to any and all visitors for one of the two garden tours it hosts each year.

Ah Easter. A day traditionally filled with brightly colored eggs and the bunnies that inexplicably lay them, a fat honeyed ham, and clusterbombs. Well, the last one may not be a tradition yet, but the Vineeta Foundation and a coalition of other peace advocacy groups including Code Pink, DAWN, Voters for Peace, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Coalition for Justice and Accountability, Democracy Rising, US Campaign to End the Occupation, Backbone Campaign, After Downing St., Iran Coalition…

FRIDAY: >> We don’t usually hype big studio movies in the Picks, but when faced with a certain kind of reptile on a specific form of transportation — there’s not much you can do but cross your fingers it doesn’t turn out to suck and jump on the hype train (err, plane). More specifically, literally dozens of local D-list Internet celebrities will be attending the 10:10 p.m. screening of Snakes on a Plane at the…

Good morning, Washington. The weather should be fair with temperatures near 60 degrees. More Details on Fiery Suicide Attempt Outside White House: DCist thought that self-immolation was a tactic limited to Beijing and the most hard-core Falug Dafa protesters. Now, just steps from the White House an FBI terror informant from Yemen set himself on fire out of despair, just days Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the executive residence was reopened to pedestrian traffic. The…

As we’ve mentioned, lines to vote today have been forcasted to be long, and indeed they are. This photo here is of the voting site at the 2nd District Police headquarters on Idaho Avenue. Over at the International Union of Operating Engineers hall in Glover Park, the line to vote stretched down Calvert Street nearly to the western gate to the vice president’s house at the Naval Observatory. (Here’s the Post’s morning update on…

Apparently, D.C. fire and rescue personnel are security risks, so the Secret Service has taken over fire and rescue operations at the White House and the Naval Observatory, which is home to the vice president’s residence. Though the Secret Service won’t confirm or deny the jurisdictional shift, sources tell the W.Times that one concern is that D.C. fire personnel haven’t been required to undergo security background checks since 1992. From the W.Times: The new unit…

DCist is not a big fan of MapQuest. Despite the fact that the mapping service can be very useful, direction queries can often give confusing directions, or in some cases, directions that are just plain wrong. So we decided to torment the MapQuest computers by giving it two locations near the White House: 1550 Pennsylvania Ave. NW and 1750 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. One is inside a restricted zone, the second is outside. 1550 would…