Amidst the costumes and curried goat, the floats and feathers, the ubiquitous bobbie boogieing awkwardly against a spry Bacchanalian beauty, visitors to this year's Notting Hill Carnival may spot a new attraction: the begging bowl. Global credit woes may have crunched the ambition of this year's performers, with organising group London Notting Hill Carnival Limited admitting that anecdotal evidence suggests many of the acts have had to significantly reduce their sequin count. The main......

O2, it seems, are cornering the market in progressive mobile gadegtry, already having the monopoly on the shiny smart iPhone and now the pilot phase OyPhone. Sorry, "Oyster Wallet" is the much more sensible and meaningless name for TfL's latest technology wheeze which puts your travelcard in your mobile phone and today, 500 Oyster users begin trialling the Nokia 6131 handsets with Oyster embedded. Barclaycard are also in on the trial, charging up the......

Except they’ve moved to a tip in Croydon and are decidedly less furry than their 1970s incarnation. When Channel 4 advertised for volunteers to participate in a prize eco-challenge, most of the respondents were anticipating the jungle, or polar icecaps perhaps. What they actually ended up doing was living as modern Borrowers on rubbish for three weeks. Literally. They were plonked in a municipal refuse dump in South London and told to get on with......

Being huge fans of David Mamet's House of Games and other great con stories (have you seen Eddie Izzard in The Riches yet? Great stuff) we've been following the Blue Peter grift very carefully. It's a classic con that we think scam artists the world over will copy and make their own. The beauty is in the simplicity of the long con. All you need is to create a popular children's television show and......

Farmers' markets are great. In London, they fulfil all our inner-city fantasies of organic fruit and vegetables grown lovingly by beefy, ruddy-cheeked country-dwellers with comedy Somerset accents. It's all about getting back to roots via root vegetables. Really dirty potatoes are always popular but Dulwich being Dulwich saw slightly more dressed up tubers at the Dulwich Farmers' Market last Sunday. Sunday 25 February was the 4th Starchy Gallery competition, an annual contest to find......

Here at Londonist, we like Eat Your Own Ears - a promotions company who always seem to put together really good lineups. And their gig this week featuring King Creosote, Larrikin Love, Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor, and Peter Bjorn and John is absolutely no exception. If we weren't going to be dancing round to Betty Boo songs at Cosmic Fury then this gig would tickle our fancy no end. So instead, we're going to......

Tony Blair has made politics interesting again by comparing Number Ten to a time travelling space craft. When asked by an 11-year-old Blue Peter viewer called Christopher if the place was bigger on the inside than it looked, he replied: "Yes, I mean a lot bigger, we call it like the Tardis. What happens is you come in and you think you're just coming into a house ... then there are several flats and......

Another bumper crop of things to do and see this weekend, in particular all the Big Dance events taking place around town - more details here. But for the non-dance related things to see and do, the Culture Crawl starts here... Friday 21 July 1001 Nights Now at the British Museum. An evening of Arabian fairy tales re-told through the stories of migrant workers from the Middle East in Britain today; this is an......

BBC4 are giving the beloved Routemaster a sendoff with a night of dedicated double decker telly: On Friday 9 December, the most famous bus in the world - the Routemaster - will take its final journey through the streets of London. BBC Four and Arena celebrate the transport icon. The day after the last Routemaster has buckarooed its final passenger from its suicide step you can sit back in your London Transport Museum PJs......

The hype around season two (or season 28 if you want to be anorakish about the whole thing) of Doctor Who is building. The BBC are reporting that K-9 is being dragged back into the fold. No news yet that they're going to update the thing with modern jiggery pokery so we'll keep our fingers crossed that he'll be as loveably crap as we remember. He's only in the one episode, but one of......

'It's National Vegetarian Week' we said. 'Eat a banana' we said. Do you listen? Do you bugger. And what do you do instead? You go and eat squirrels... Well not all of you... but someone's been nibbling at Tufty and his pals at Sir Terence Conran's Butlers Wharf Chop House (STCBWCH for the hipsters). We thought that grey squirrels were considered vermin now along with the pigeons. Are we reduced to eating vermin now?......

Now that's a Prime Minister... flying through the heavens, defying the laws of nature, deflecting lightning blasts and still home well before the start of Blue Peter. Makes Howard's powers of darkness seem a tad old fashioned... Damn, but this election is dull. Only a week or so to go, thank Odin, as we're already bored with having to destuff the Londonist letterbox of badly designed political leaflets and rather than just turn the......

It seems a bit harsh, but yesterday the huge Christmas tree which has stood proudly in Trafalgar Square for the past couple of weeks was shredded and made into compost. As part of the effort to make this tree the 'greenest' in London's history (energy efficient lights and a hydrogen fuel cell generator) the tree was fed into a chipper by Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron and Blue Peter presenter Simon Thomas. A section of......