If the powers that be think we're going to go easily or quietly, they're wrong. The Post today exposed a devious little plan to chip away at the District's identity, starting with phasing out the city's postmark and replacing it instead with one bearing the name of our northern neighbor, Maryland. According to a Post study, of 235 letters mailed from every quadrant and zip code within city limits, only 24 -- 10 percent --......

>> In case you missed our full interview with Josh Ritter this morning, check it out before heading over to see the singer/songwriter at 9:30 club, with Old School Freight Train. $20 tickets are still available, doors 7:30 p.m. >> Renowned poet Simon Armitage is at Olsson's in Old Town for a free reading of his latest translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". 7 p.m., read all about it in our preview.......

A little patience resulted in this great photo by Flickr user epmd. He says the first night he shot this colorful playground in the evening, nothing was to his satisfaction, so, undeterred, he went out again a few nights later and came back with this wonderfully exposed shot. EXIF. This is your last reminder to join us at the DCist Photographer's Meet Up this Sunday. Epmd, moderator of the Washington DC/Metro Area Flickr pool,......

Nicknamed "Waves and Gulls," the Navy-Marine Memorial on Columbia Island is probably among the least photographed monuments in D.C. Flickr user Leica Mark makes up for it with this technically and artistically fantastic shot of it with his, of course, Leica M7. In fact, he has a whole series of amazing monument shots that seriously put to shame what's out there displaying our city to the rest of the world. Don't forget, we're hosting......

You don't always see big blocks of ice near the Potomac, especially not in late April. And you almost never see blocks of ice direct from Sweden. The blocks in this picture by hey helen are from the village of Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, taken from the same river used to make the Ice Hotel. The ice sculptures were part of an art exhibition by the Swedish Embassy last week. And something else about this photo......

By now you must know how much DCist loves our photographers who contribute through Flickr. You're probably sick of hearing us talk about them really, like your co-worker with the fabulous new millionaire boyfriend she keeps gabbing on about. But we can't help it -- we just adore these folks for offering up such great work to share with us. So you can understand why we've been so upset after reading the following discussion from......

What does a young graffiti artist brought down in his prime do? Go back to tagging of course, but this time for a living. Borf, the notorious Virginia-based graffiti artist that spent the better part of two years brazenly tagging everything in the District from garbage cans to highway signs (a sampling of his work is pictured here), may just have found his dream job. After being sentenced to a month in jail last February......

One last list of picks from local arists as we look back on the year that was 2006. Today's final installment comes courtesy of W. Ellington Felton, Jukebox The Ghost, The Fake Accents, Telograph and the DCist Music Staff. W. Ellington Felton 1. Thom Yorke, Eraser This is an electronic record minus the noise that a lot of the others out there have. I can listen to this straight through. This is the perfect cd......

Amanda Mattos contributed to this post. A recent tip from Dave at Indiefolkforever lead us to a rather unflattering portrait of our fair city. Norfolk & Western, a Portland band that visited D.C. last month, apparently didn't have a very nice time playing DC9 or visiting the U street/Shaw neighborhood in Northwest D.C. As part of a tour journal posted on Local Cut, the band wrote: Washington DC proved to be a less pleasant experience......

For those of us who considered the idea of an electronic music massive dead, Omnipresent Syndicate has a prepared a compelling case as to why we should reconsider. Enter Gathering DC, a party tomorrow night at Love featuring some of the best house DJs in the world. The first class lineup includes David Morales, one of the first "Superstar DJs," Miami's Robbie Rivera, and New York's Todd Terry (known for his remix "I'll House You"......

Written by DCist contributor Vince Wadhwani, of BuyIndie.net The reality of big chains and online retailers is that for many small businesses, competing against them is extremely difficult — especially when it comes to prices. One local clothing store has found a successful approach in focusing on novelty — by providing clothing items that you won't see your neighbor wearing the next week. "I try to re-merchandise the shop at least once a week; It's......

Being a political town, perhaps you've found your friend pool shrink drastically over the past few weeks, as politicos head to places near and far to spread the the joy of democracy to the people. You've noticed that Hill bars have felt rather empty during recent Thursday nights. Maybe you've found yourself lamenting over the fact that you're not feeling the rush of a campaign, and you're looking for local ways to get involved on......

Many DCists' tango knowledge draws exclusively from sexy Antonio Banderas dance scenes, Scent of a Woman, or that Shakira video in constant rotation at Gold's Gym. But there's an entire world of tango out there, and the district is showcasing the sultry dance this week during the Washington DC Tango Festival. Tonight and Wednesday, tango goes to the movies, as the Argentinian embassy screens Tango Maestro — The Life and Music of Astor Piazzolla this......

Compiled by Amanda Mattos, Kyle Gustafson, James Smalley and Chris Snyder MONDAY >> Fort Reno can be rained out but never washed away. Tonight, catch a make-up bill of City Goats, Sentai and Metropolitan (***). 7:15 pm, Free, Fort Reno Park, 3950 Chesapeake St Nw Washington DC. TUESDAY >> You'll have to rub Craig's tummy for tickets to this sold out show, but an acoustic evening with the ever dreamy Pete Yorn may just be......

Summer is here and with it comes wholesome outdoor entertainment for the whole family. The spotlit evening baseball games, campground marshmallow roasting, and of course, the subversive DC rock concert series that is Fort Reno. Boasting no alcoholic beverages but a lot of teens and a few strollers, the free concert rocks atop the highest point in DC every Monday and Thursday from 7:30-9:30 throughout the summer. During the civil war, the Parrot heavy rifles......

Rusty, it was your wingman post. A DCist reader led us to this post over at why.i.hate.dc, where the site's author discusses the local blog D.C. Late Night Shots and wonders why he's been picking up traffic from the "closed social network," most of which is, as you might guess, inaccessible to those who haven't been invited. DCist, however, was able to dig up one of the highly exclusive invites (note: we're not the first......

For the past two days, Washington DC’s 9:30 club has played host to two of indie rock’s most well regarded bands—The New Pornographers and Belle and Sebastian. While you’d never mistake one band for the other, the common traits of both acts on this nominally co-headliner tour are their highly inventive songwriting and dextrous musical arrangements. Over the past two days, fans of both bands came out in force, but it was clear after two......

It was just last week that the City Paper debuted a new, snazzier website, and a little further down memory lane that the Washington Times undertook its own online upgrade. Now the Examiner has followed suit, presenting the District with its fresh yet simple new website today. Much like the Times before them, the Examiner has chosen an online presentation that while remaining simple focuses on allowing visitors to access the paper's online content more......

Dybbuk, the term for a spirit that enters the body of someone who is living, is derived from the Hebrew word "to cling". Appropriately, the Washington DC Jewish Community Center's (DCJCC) production of S. Anski's classic Jewish text, The Dybbuk, focuses on characters who cling to things a little too tightly. Leah's father Sender (Irakli Kavsadze), for example, clings to the idea that a marriage full of material riches, in contrast to one formed by......

Even Tibet's exiled spiritual leader and all-round lovable guy the Dalai Lama thinks the District's lack of voting rights is a little lame, according to our friends at DC Vote, who sent us an article including the following: Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, took a rare swipe at the United States, saying he was puzzled why residents in the capital of the world's oldest democracy have no Congressional voting rights. The Tibetan leader......

Nike says "oops," according to Pitchfork Media. The shoe giant has apologized for blatantly ripping off imagery from the cover of hardcore band Minor Threat’s 1981 self-titled album. Last week, it was reported that Nike Skateboarding was using a design eerily similar to the Minor Threat album to promote its "Major Threat" 2005 East Coast skateboarding tour. D.C.'s own Dischord Records was pissed and said as much, but it wasn’t until yesterday that Nike expressed......

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. Bloggers, always getting down to work in their pajamas. With tacky, fluffy bunny slippers, quaffing ranch dressing right out of the bottle as they issue their diatribes. Okay, okay. I hear you shouting, "Enough already." It’s a cliché, to be sure, but the last time I checked, a Google fight between "bloggers and pajamas" and "bloggers and three-piece suits with stylish wingtips" was a decided......

With the city's red-hot housing market showing no signs of easing, dozens of luxury condominium projects are either under construction or opening soon throughout the city, especially downtown and near Metro stations. On the web, DCGentrification.com has listings of projects along U Street and in Columbia Heights, JD Land's Near Southeast webpage contains an impressive compendium of information about development in that region, and DCLofts.com has an exhaustive listing of "Lofts, loft-style, and urban condo......

When we saw the headline on the BBC's homepage "Educating America: How the Christian Right is attempting to transform US culture" we clicked through, interested to find out precisely what our friends across the pond had discovered about America. We were even more interested when it turned out the story was a profile of a school just 50 miles from D.C., Patrick Henry College, founded in 2000 by a home school activist for primarily evangelical......

Although D.C. has a growing group of dedicated photobloggers (see our list on the bottom left) there are many photographers who would like to share their photos online but who don't have the technical skills -- or the time -- to run a full time photoblog. For them there is the Washington DC/Metro Area photo sharing group on the popular photography website Flickr. Flickr can best be described as a super-charged Friendster (or TheFacebook) for......

It's not clear if Elissa Silverman, the City Paper's Loose Lips columnist, knew that her "Secret Santa" column late last year would be her final piece criticizing and poking fun at D.C. political figures. If she had known, we would have liked her to 'present' us with an announcement of her upcoming departure. Then we could have immediately applied for her awesome former job. According to the today's print version of the City Paper, applicants......

You know what? D.C. gets a bum rap sometimes, but there really is a ton of great stuff constantly going on in this town, and not just on the weekends. With that in mind, DCist brings you Out and About: Hump Day -- events dedicated to Wednesday, that most humpable day of the week. Check out what's happening this evening: Former presidential candidate Howard Dean gives a talk and signs his new book, "You Have......

In the interest of trying to be relatively neutral, we here at DCist cannot normally go off into the sort of ranting and raving reviews of shows and bands that we might like to. (Also because it would probably put you to sleep to hear all of our pretentious ramblings.) But that doesn’t mean we can’t point you toward a couple of great sites that know their stuff about the local music scene. So we......

DCist spotted this nifty little button on the bus today. The owner, who conveniently had an extra when we expressed interest, said it was from the new Adidas store in Georgtown. In August, D.C. became one of eight U.S. cities which will have an "Adidas Originals Concept store," ours located at 1251 Wisconsin Avenue. From their website, capitalization, spelling, and punctuation unchanged: North America's 5th adidas Originals Store was opened in Washington DC's coolest area:......