Lasers, screens, explosions, giant mutant zombie mummies (hmm, we may have inadvertently made a cruel pun there), apparently the latest gig gizmo is to parade your offspring, as opposed to The Offspring, which in this case might actually have been better. Brooklyn, Romeo, and Cruz Posh, Baby Beau, Barbabelle, and Scary Phoenix and Angel Scary Murphy all joined their famous Mums onstage at the O2 this week, during the track Mama. Surely these people......

A night of clubbing is as much about the music you want to hear as it is the experience you hope to get out of it. Whilst there are endless opportunities to don your best threads and brave the night buses to see and be seen, we prefer to come as we are, get sweaty and get down. With their irresistible selection of post-punk and electro classics and obscurities, Our Disco ticks all our......

A 20-year old woman identified only as Michelle has made public the sad cases of separation from her children enforced by social services in Bexley, south-east London. Michelle had her first child aged 13, her second at 16 and a third before she turned 20. All three children were taken from her by Bexley social services and put up for adoption and she herself was put into foster care. She was allowed very little......

. We're all aware that identity theft is a real problem. We've all been told to shred our personal documents before throwing them out and to keep our PIN details private so that unscrupulous people don't steal our identities and run us into debt by buying holidays to Mauritius and taking out loans in our name. We generally don't worry about our pets though. They don't have credit ratings, so we figured that their......

All across the Ist-A-Verse (or at least the American parts thereof), writers and editors are in the midst of enjoying their three-day weekend. But after the week we've all had, we feel like the break is not only needed, but deserved. Just look at everything we've been doing! Gothamist headed into the Memorial Day weekend with a number of tasks accomplished. They worried about Long Islanders giving New Yorkers a bad name. They tried......

Working mothers have begun using webcams to keep an eye on their sproglets playing the day away in childcare while they slave the day away at the office. Whatever happened to eyes in the backs of mothers’ heads? Today’s technology has obviously weeded out that gene in more modern women. Our mothers took every opportunity to remind us of their freakish back-of-head vision. But for the hip, young mamas who want to ensure that......

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. Torontoist Special Report: Rosie to Trump: "Fire 300 Bicyclists for Fraud!" On DCist: Students Go Wild for Slogans, Secrets and Sexual Harassment The action was thick......

It's a good day for fans of caged simians. First, the dastard who stole SpongeBob the monkey from Chessington has been sentenced. Monkey rustler Marlon Brown will serve a year behind bars himself after what the judge described as "an act of devilry". In the event the monkey was recovered but it was traumatised and still is traumatised. You showed no remorse. SpongeBob has since been moved to Battersea Zoo. He infrequently updates his......

The Optronica festival took place last week, and Londonist was lucky enough to get tickets for the sold-out session on Friday evening at the BFI IMAX, where we were treated to video mash-ups by festival programmers Addictive TV, and a reactive retelling of Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper trilogy by the director himself. It was easily the trendiest thing we'd been to all year - possibly ever - as proved by the high proportion of......

Papa Mouse: [To his 9 starving children] My little mouslings, the snow of a few weeks ago has been particularly cruel to us and our humble home, here in the space between the bins behind Yummy Fried Chicken Shack in Newham. We will die before dawn as we have already eaten Grandma and nobody wants to go to the tube station for any chewing gum. I'm sorry. I have loved you all. Well, most......

Now that Scotland Yard have handed their files on the Litvinenko investigation over to the Crown Prosecution Service, the BBC are hazarding a guess at who done it - former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi in the Mayfair hotel with the radioactive teapot. Mr Lugovoi met Mr Litvinenko on the day he fell ill, and radioactive polonium-210 has been found in a string of places he had visited in London. But Mr Lugovoi has said......

Naming babies after where they were conceived or where they born is slightly embarrassing. If the former, then it's rather too much information to present strangers with your child Pizza Hut Fire Escape. If it's the latter then there is the risk of bringing up a child called Minicab or Somewhere Between Car Park and Maternity Ward. Risky though it is, sometimes it can just about work in the child's favour. 32 year old......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

A Greenpeace report released today points to chemical contamination as a factor in decline of European eel population: The report, "Slipping Away: the presence of perfluorinated chemicals in eels (Anguilla anguilla) from 11 European countries", including the UK, reveals that European eels, once common but now in rapid decline, are widely contaminated with perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs), a source of rising concern due to their toxicity and widespread distribution in the environment. The eels tested......

It is a mark of adolescence to (pretend to) get rid of the toys of childhood - a sort of clearing of the decks for the bulkier and distinctly less fun items that come with aging like boyfriends / girlfriends, student loans, mortgages, babies, pensions, the urn for your ashes and so on. However, it is a mark of adulthood to rediscover the toys of childhood and clasp them to your brooding, nostalgia-ridden bosom......

Velorution have kicked off their 'worst dressed cyclist' competition which we mentioned a few days ago and, boy, is it ugly out there. Ok, so these pictures were ataged by Velorution to get people inspired, but we know that these kinds of disasters do make it on to our streets, and frankly we're starting to wonder if we've ever been guilty of such atrocities. If you want to enter the competiton all you have......

Velorution says: We ride our bikes everywhere, but that doesn’t mean we want to look like it. Londonist says: Amen to that brother. As keen bicyclists, it always makes us green with envy when we go to Europe and see dapper gents and chic chicks navigating those picturesque European backstreets without a shred of lycra and no evidence of Goretex. Luckily for us, it looks like Velorution have been thinking the same thing: Late......

He stands just 50 cm tall – the average height for a newborn baby. But Khagendra Thapa Magar from Nepal is a 14-year-old boy who isn’t going to grow any further. Now he’s been invited over to our fair city by the Guinness Book of World Records, who want to verify his dual claim as world’s shortest and lightest person. (We presume there’s some qualifying restriction here, ruling out babies, foetuses, zygotes and the......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. To start us off, 3AM Magazine has an interview with Tom McCarthy whose debut novel, Remainder, has just been published by Alma Books, and whose critical essay, Tintin and the Secret Literature, is reviewed in the Guardian. And sticking with comics, Free New Books provides an eclectic library of downloadable reads, of most interest......

These listings appear every Wednesday. If you want to let us know about any upcoming science or technology events, you can contact us on LondonistSciTech@Gmail.com Event of the Week Dino Jaws at the Natural History Museum Nothing packs in the punters like a few animatronic dinosaurs. Well, nothing except animatronic elephants. So the NHM should see its attendances soar like a pterodactyl with the opening of its new Dino Jaws exhibition. It’s Natural History......

The Londonist Culture Crawl started in Canary Wharf for the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival - and we knew it was going to be colourful the second we emerged from the cool grey steel-toned enclosure of Canary Wharf station and were confronted with the gigantic orange inflatable set for Candoco Dance Company's Minotoria. Blinking and scratching our heads, we watched as the company's able and disable-bodied performers moved around to a growling, bass-heavy soundtrack......

A man was arrested yesterday afternoon in south east London as part of a major investigation into 'alleged international terrorism'. On Monday three other men were arrested in Hackney as part of the same investigation. Mayor Ken has announced his plans for an architecture and urban design unit which will "support the delivery of world-class architecture and sustainable and inclusive design across London’s built environment." Talking of which: Colliers Wood Tower has been voted......

The Guardian finally worked out that metal fans are not insane and don't eat babies by going along to Deathfest VII at The Underworld in Camden: Headliners are Master, but there are also bands including Disavowed, Amputated, the Monolith Deathcult, Arsebreed, Infected Disarray, Bloodstream and Toxocara (itself a side project of Prostitute Disfigurement). This is extreme metal, this is death metal - a son of thrash metal and brother of black metal. This is......

London has a bishop. This we did not know. Then again maybe we did. Bishops are difficult to pin down in the mind. What exactly does a Bishop do, except move diagonally? Well today he's blessing a bridge: A ceremony to mark the completion of a £62m bridge at Paddington Station will take place on Tuesday. The new five-lane Bishop's Bridge is designed to improve access to one of the country's busiest rail terminals.......

As we reported earlier, Parliament Square protestor Brian Haw has had his protest stripped down to just a couple of placards. Police turned up at 2:45am and removed most of his placards, and many of his possessions. Naturally, Londonist just had to go down to Westminster and ask Haw what was going on. When we arrived, Haw being mobbed by photographers, cameramen and reporters, including a crew from an Iranian TV station. A group......

Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice, for the new series of Green Wing (Fri 9pm C4) is upon us! We don't envy whoever has to go round the Tube taking down all the teaser posters, however. There isn't much we can add to this, except it makes us happy. As does the thought of Adam Rickett being eaten by Lord Freddie Whatsisface - shame that the producers of Alive: Back To The Andes (Wed 8pm Five) chickened......

There's something about London's emergency services that creates great blogs. Random Acts of Reality has been stunning from the get go and is still going strong; World Weary Detective was similarly excellent (until it was forced to close); and if you haven't got Nee Naw in your bookmarks then shame on you. Nee Naw is home to Mark Myers, an Emergency Medical Dispatcher for the London Ambulance Service: If you were to walk into......

Well, we've already had look at Wembley today, so we might as well take a peak at London's other big, troubled development: Heathrow. Today's Times includes an article which tells us what to expect from the airport's new Terminal 5...if it ever gets finished. Apparently, according to the plans that were released today, the idea is to "transform the airport experience from one of hassle and overcrowding into a calming and pleasurable stroll, similar......

London doesn't have enough nurses to look after sick and premature babies. Only Great Ormond Street children's hospital has the reccomended one nurse for every baby. The transport watchdog London Travelwatch wants consultation processes before we see any more hikes in fair prices. Ken's urging us not to feed the pigeons again, and not just becasue he hates them. This time it's to combat bird flu. It's all about Ken today: he's also urging the......

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Al Jarreau (sort of): We'll walk by night, we'll shoot you by day! Moonlighting strangers... who just worked for the met on the way. Ahh, Maddie and David - slamming doors, getting stuck on top of hot air balloons, miscarrying babies... What. A. Show. Of course it completely overshadowed 1984's Cover Up to the point that most of you won't remember it at all. Think Remington Steele with a little......