SFist saw Christmas Day turn tragic after a Siberian tiger escaped from her pen at the San Francisco Zoo, killing a visitor and mauling two others. Phillyist counted down the top ten items on Philadelphia's New Year's wish list. Gothamist looked at the wooden bikes being offered for NYC's first bike share program on Governors Island. LAist received a Christmas present in the form of a drunk Santa Claus in a g-string. Bostonist launched......

While the week between Christmas and New Year's is far from a dead zone for movies, most of the new fare that's going to be brought out before year's end has already come out, and those that the studios did save for Christmas day release look wholly uninteresting, from sequels to films that were horrible missteps to begin with, to overly earnest inspirational fare. Instead, we'll join the living in the past bandwagon and revisit......

According to Forbes magazine, the Washington Capitals are the third most worthless team in the National Hockey League. This is a big step up from last year, when they were number one! Of course, being businessmen and not hockey fans, the boys at Forbes have failed to take into account the kinds of younger, developing players that the Caps hold, ready to carry them to success either this year or in the immediate future. If......

Washington, D.C. makes yet another top ten list. A new study names our beloved city as the 8th gayest in the country. Frankly, a couple of us here at DCist thought we were gayer than that. The study, by Gary J. Gates of UCLA's Williams Institute, analyzed data on same-sex couples from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. censuses along with that from American Community Surveys (ACS) between 2002 and 2006. Cities and states were ranked......

As usual, you said a lot of funny and thought-provoking stuff last week. But like LeVar Burton, don't take our word for it, and read on for Georgetown protests, monkeyrotica running a museum, and GMU fraternities, among other things. ------ monkeyrotica would be an awesome director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine: The disorganized state of the Army Medical Museum is an example of vicious circle funding: hardly anybody visits the place because......

Good Friday to you, Washington. Are you getting psyched for the weekend already? No? Did we mention how nice the weather's going to be yet? Predictions are for mostly sunny skies and low humidity levels on Saturday with below-normal high temperatures in the low 80s and overnight lows sinking down to, get this, the low 60s. It's like Christmas in August! District Plagued By Lead Concerns: It's sure starting to feel like we're having......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Summer in Washington means the return of many familiar sights, some welcomed, others not as much. It means baseball, but also sticky heat and humidity. It means evenings at barbecues and bars with outdoor seating, but also children roaming the streets with backpacks full of cherry bombs and bottle rockets. It means, for many of us, time off. For others it means......

Happy Father's Day! For those of you who have dads, are dads, or know dads, this one's for you, from all of us at the Gothamist network. It was a week of bizarre, embarassing headlines at DCist. The trial of the local administrative law judge who sued his cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants left everyone shaking their heads. Then the capital city was nearly brought to its knees, twice, by......

>> A suspicious package at the National Postal Museum next to Union Station caused the area to be evacuated during the lunch rush today. Luckily -- or perhaps, unluckily, if you work for the bomb squad -- the offending package turned out to contain only a soiled diaper. The area was reopened by 1:30 p.m. On behalf of the city, DCist would like to thank you, fearless, put upon bomb squad members, for keeping us......

If you approach the District every morning via the I-270 Interchange at the Capital Beltway in Montgomery County, you probably let an impressive barrage of expletives escape your lips on a daily basis about how bad a bottleneck the meeting of those two highways are. Luckily, Forbes magazine is here to tell you, you're not alone. Via WTOP, we learn today that the interchange in question has once again been named the 7th worst bottleneck......

Georgetown 61, Pittsburgh 53 The Big East is aptly named. The 16-team behemoth is the largest in Division I and backs up its girth with some of the finest play in the nation. So it's no small feat that Georgetown has climbed to the top of this daunting hill. Backed by the strong play of juniors Jeff Green, Roy Hibbert, and Jonathan Wallace, the Hoyas gritted their way to a victory over a Pittsburgh......

Watch where you step this morning, Washington! The Examiner brings us word that the D.C. Emergency Management Agency lists manhole cover explosions, like the one that brough traffic to a standstill around the National Mall last Wednesday, as one of the District’s 18 major hazards, alongside urban crime, hurricanes, terrorism and floods. See, D.C. has the second–largest underground power system in the country, which means underground fires which can cause those manholes to explode are......

For the first time this season, two area teams occupy spots in the AP's top 10 for women's college hoops. While their male counterparts' seasons have been wrought with inconsistencies, reigning champs Maryland (22-3, #6) and surging GW (19-2, #8) have been making noise all season. This afternoon's poll reveals GW's first appearance in the top ten since February, 1992. The Colonials are riding a 12-game winning streak and are unbeaten in conference play. Their......

Congratulations, everybody: Wired says that we're one of the nation's top ten tech towns, putting us in the company of undeniably geek-friendly cities like San Francisco, Austin and Seattle. But to be honest, Wired's methodology seems a little bit suspect. Other cities made the list on the basis of a high number of comic book stores per capita, the ubiquity of free wifi, or the popularity of the local Dorkbot chapter. Our qualifications? We're desperately......

Hoyas Bully the Irish Georgetown came into Saturday’s contest with Notre Dame after a successful, if underwhelming non-conference season. After starting the year with high hopes and a top ten ranking, three early losses pushed them off the national radar and out of the rankings. ND, however, was so hot they were smokin’, and riding a 12-game winning streak to a #17 ranking. But after a 66-48 thrashing of the Irish at the Verizon Center,......

Sunday. Usually, a quiet, contemplative day in the Blogosphere. But not here in the Ist-a-Verse. Nonono! Just look below and see all of the wild and crazy stuff our staffs are up to. In Austin, bands are beginning to confirm for SXSW and the rumor mill is up and running. Good thing, too, because we all know how much Austinites love live performances. Austin also found itself in the national spotlight, with Longhorn Legend......

It may not be possible to resolve the great Nearlington vs. Farlington debate. But there's a compromise available: apparently we can start calling both halves of the county Smartlington. If for some reason we wanted to. Via the Examiner, it seems that Money Magazine has named Arlington the most educated city in the country thanks to an impressive 35.7 percent of its citizens holding graduate degrees (apparently this was enough to make up for the......

We knew that speeding tickets were unusually common in the District, we knew that the city was making some decent bank off of the violations, and we even suspected racism, or at least wardism, in the placement of automated speed cameras. But just in case you leadfeet had begun to forget the danger of motoring quickly through D.C., we now have the National Motorists Association to remind us. From their website:Nothing can ruin a vacation......

This entry was written by DCist contributor Andrew Wiseman Bad news for GW basketball fans - leading scorer Danilo Pinnock's GW days are over, as he will soon sign with an agent. Pinnock, a junior, had entered his name into the NBA draft but was expected to return until now. The Colonials already lost senior forwards Pops Mensah-Bonsu, Mike Hall, and Omar Williams to graduation, so another top ten ranking in Foggy Bottom doesn't appear......

From time to time, we have a little miscommunication here at the site, and the morning roundup doesn't get up as it normally does. Then we play a little game called live-blogging. First Stop: I'm sure it comes as a shock that we tend to hit the Washington Post first thing in the morning. Being a demographics geek, my eyes are immediately drawn to a story revealing that Virginia's Caroline and King George Counties, at......

Scorching housing markets across the country might be taking a breather, but Washington area buyers and sellers don't seem particularly fazed by rising interest rates and uncertain economic conditions. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight is reporting year on year growth for the last quarter of 2005 of 12.95 percent nationwide, which equates to a fair amount of continued energy for the country as a whole. In Washington, however, prices last quarter were......

There's a lot of squabbling around here about who is the area's best basketball team. But overlooked in the discussion of George Washington's first appearance in the top ten since 1956, Georgetown's win over then-top ranked and previously undefeated Duke, and Maryland's ... suspensions -- is the fact that the Maryland women are quietly having arguably D.C.'s best season. With an 88-77 home victory over Miami, the Terps moved to 20-2 on the year, 7-1......

Editor's note: This top ten list was compiled by local art blogger and man-about-town Kriston Capps. Let’s be forward about it—top ten lists don’t really make a lot of sense. Especially for a field as diverse as contemporary art. Really, how much better is the sculpture of the giant Cheetoh than the digitally manipulated photograph? A true accounting for the decision-making process behind a hierarchical ranking of art shows would make the BCS computerized college......

We've all had those moments where we're shown a snapshot of ourselves, and we find ourselves looking at that snapshot and thinking, "Holy crap, do I look like that? I don't look like that. I don't know how you took this photo, but I totally don't look like that." Comes now the Post, and the photo it's waving is the 2005 version of its Best Bets Readers' Choice survey, put together from registered readers' nominations......

If you're anything like most of the people in D.C., you're getting out of Dodge City any way you can for some vacation time this summer. Most likely, you're leaving on a jet plane for some (hopefully) exotic and non-humid locale. Well, be prepared to wait: Ken Mead, the inspector general at the U.S. Department of Transportation, has said that the summer of 2005 will be the worst ever for flight delays -- more than......

If you missed it at the local National Film Challenge screening at the Warehouse Theater or at Artomatic 2004, the hilarious (and perhaps a bit prophetic) mockumentary "Felt: Tearing the Fabric of America" is now available online. The short piece, produced by local groups Cavegirl Productions and Defectiv Films, was fully made over the course of one weekend and was recently named "Best Mockumentary" by the NFC. "Felt" was also named one of the top......

We at DCist like to take this time of year to pause and take stock of the past year. Although we may have only launched in September, plenty has happened in the past few months to warrant a retrospective of some of our favorite posts. For some we had to cheat a little bit and rolled a few posts into one, but we didn't think you'd mind. We'll be entering the new year with a......

"Recently, some newcomers to the local media circuit ... are stealing some of the limelight from Washington's old standards in local news," says an article appearing in this week's "Northwest Passages" section of the Current group of neighborhood D.C. papers. (Which includes the Georgetown Current and the Dupont Current) The newcomers in question are your friendly DCist writers, of course! The story, written by reporter Julia O'Donoghue, is a good overview of what we're about,......

With less than two weeks before the show closes, now's time to plan your trip to Artomatic. The annual artist-organized show has filled the former Capital Children's Museum with art of all kinds. Today, D.C. artist Mark Jenkins' tape men showed up at the Washington Post building asking for Blake Gopnik (see his spoof story), the author of the Post's scathing review of the show. (To their credit, the Post did create a special feedback......

Weather: Today will be partly cloudy with highs in the 60s as a high pressure system hovers over the Eastern Seaboard. Cloud cover will increase in the afternoon and evening, with a 10 percent chance of precipitation. Taxi Strike Called for Today: A taxi work stoppage we reported yesterday has been called today by a taxi association to protest legislation proposed by Mayor Anthony Williams which would increase the regulation of taxis in the district,......