Congratulations – you can read! (Presumably. Unless you just look at Londonist for the pictures.) Literacy is sexy. Hyper-literacy, even sexier. Or so we at Londonist tell ourselves as we don our Coke-bottle glasses and curl up each night with a bottle of wine and a dictionary. But enough about our steamy Valentine’s Day plans. What have you got planned? Now, you may have inferred that we’re a jaded lot over here at Londonist.......

We don't know whether crime is on the up or down but two new initiatives to engage London youth in the debate hit the news today. In Wood Green, kids suggested that a text 999 hotline to the police might encourage people to report crime on buses without drawing attention to themselves. Across town in Forest Gate, a genuine El Salvadoran gangsta attempted to deglamourise gang culture at a school assembly, giving the Met......

We haven't mentioned the Roundhouse lately and didn't expect to for the Christmas season, but we're pleasantly surprised to announce a new show in the completely circular space in Camden that opens tonight and runs for the festive period. LOFT is a comedy, circus, dance, music, video and live DJ mash-up by The 7 Fingers who were all formerly members of Cirque du Soleil. It's a story of 7 flatmates breaking up the monotony......

Ahoy hoy, book grocery shoppers! The metaphorical book grocer aisles are stocked high with choice meats and sweet confections this December, so whatever your tastes, fill up your shopping cart and gorge yourself on this week’s selection of literary events – they’ll give you much less of a stomach-ache than mince pies. Monday: Revisit Sylvia Plath by attending the aptly named Sylvia Plath Revisited, at the ICA (7pm in the Nash Room £10 nonmembers/£9......

Jewish Free School (JFS) in North London, Britain’s top Jewish state school and indeed one of Britain’s largest schools overall, was yesterday charged with breaking anti-discrimination laws and ordered to remove a section of its admissions criteria that gives preference to ethnically Jewish children over religious Jewish children. The decision comes in light of a series of controversies in which the off-spring of Jewish converts have been rejected from a place at JFS on the......

Huge clouds of smoke can be seen over Bow, east London, visible from as far as Queen's Park. A disused warehouse on Waterden Road has caught fire and according to the news emerging right now, there are 15 fire engines and between 40 and 75 firefighters attending it. Waterden Road passes through the Olympic site and as you can imagine, people are anxious but remaining calm. The smoke cloud is drifting southwards towards Canary......

Our much feted and stylish monarch opened the all-new and yet all-old St. Pancras terminal today after a 10 year revamp (of the station that is, not the Queen). The station is (as of next week) to be home to Eurostar after a 5.8 billion pound upgrade of the railway line between London and the coast (which now means trains can actually go as fast as they do on French soil instead of going shstikoff-shstikoff-shstikoff-all-the-way-home).......

Ear of the Year? It's not a typo, nor is it an attempt to fetishise one of the body's less aesthetically appealing organs through association with their derriere-concerned namesake (though we'd applaud any such effort). The capital's already got plenty of sex if that's your thing. Ear of the Year is in fact part of a campaign by the Royal National Institute for the Deaf. They're trying to find the country's best ear, or......

Many comedy fans will already have experienced the pleasure of watching Pappy's Fun Club, the if.comedy nominated sketch troupe who are arguably the most exciting act working on the live comedy circuit. For the uninitiated, Pappy's are a four-piece band of boys whose silly, upbeat and joyous sketches leave audiences with a severe bout of happiness. They have a lovely, fresh take on the traditional live sketch format - by breaking down the fourth......

Hot on the heels of basketball and ice hockey, the third of America's big four sports has begun its landing on our shores. The advance guard for Sunday's NFL encounter between the Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants consists of just one man. Albeit a very big one. Pictured above is the specially commissioned twenty-six foot high animatronic statue of Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor which is touring London and the South East......

We clearly don't think as ambitiously as Tim Slater, organiser of the world's largest underwater dinner party who got 500 people in black tie and evening dress to eat a 3 course meal, underwater, in Acton on Saturday. After all, we thought growing beards for Battersea was a pretty wacky way to raise some cash. The key to underwater dinner is jelly; a fine coating of which made the salmon, vegetables and toffee apple......

Fancy a gig with a difference? Friday night's alright for fighting zombies, as zombiecore band Send More Paramedics are playing London tonight, and on the menu is braaaaaains, braaaaains and more braaaains. Somewhere between 'horrorcore' punk band the Misfits (as lead singer B'Hellmouth said:"the Misfits, they are the Godfathers of Horrorpunk, they invented it, we're just re-hashing what they did really. Apart from the fact that we're actually dead of course. That's the difference")......

Arguably the best city in the world for a music fan to live, pop legends come to play in London all the time. Often not only do they come for just one gig, but they stay for a while when they could easily make haste for the comforts of their own homes to eat biscuits and play video games. Prince recently played the O2 for three full weeks, Sonic Youth resided at the Roundhouse......

This weekend column is brought to you by the founders of Niceties Tokens, Liz and Pete of Team Nice. 14. Poll-itics Well, I did a quick little poll this week amongst group of 26 professional people aged 20 – 35. Just to ask them what they thought were the most and least important issues to the following parties: Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green, Socialist, BNP and UKIP. The results produced from this (admittedly tiny)......

For only Ken Livingstone has the right blend of schmaltz and gravitas to deliver yesterday’s ground-breaking apology for London’s involvement in the slave trade. Generally speaking, Londonist is a little cynical when it comes to apologists. The national apology is the grandest theatrical gesture of politics, and the ultimate in political correctitude for those in thrall to politicians. And we reckon it has to top baby-kissing and hospital-bedside-visiting for ensuring a swift ratings boost......

Londonist has long feared swans, as we've always been told that swans can break a man's arm, and a bird that is in the habit of breaking arms is a bird to be wary of. (And yes, apparently that is true. According to The Swan Sanctuary, Shepperton, it is theoretically possible. Therefore, we remain theoretically afraid of swans.) However, just because a bird could possibly break your limbs, that's no reason to develop hostilities......

Woodpeckers in Kew destroy a once record breaking flagpole. All manner of protest is going down at Heathrow. Another thing for London to be proud of - we have more than 170 gangs! If you go to Hounslow, watch out, you may be sucked dry by mosquitoes. In Wanstead and Woodford, more than half of residents are frightened of using public transport at night. Image courtesy of ~Misty~ via the Londonist flickr group.......

The Health Professions Council is a statutory body set up to regulate 13 health professions including dieticians, radiographers, paramedics and arts therapists. As they say, when you need one of these people, You need to know that they meet professional standards. You also need to know that someone will take action if things go wrong. Unfortunately, the farcical nature of such regulation has been highlighted today by the case of Derek Gale, working out......

This review was always going to say he was brilliant, of course. The diminutive one had to be great. Just how fab a live performer he can be, though, is indicated by the fact that, even though we were late (having meticulously planned a schedule which involved the O2 “Express” boat along the Thames which rocked up a sluggish 25 minutes late thereby cutting out the first 15 minutes of the Purple one’s set)......

The Monument gets a facelift Potential flooding impact on London reassessed, as new film comes out Heathrow Airport has made Hounslow residents 'thick' Air raid siren plays whenever a traffic warden approaches Council's 'Robin Hood' goes to jail for breaking the rules to help people Image courtesy of pixelthing.com via the Londonist flickr group.......

If you have ever felt that you were caught in a David Lynch film, you will know what we mean. (For the record: Londonist loves David Lynch.) Everything seems to alternate between slow motion and fast forward, but you know that can’t be right. Different people tell you different stories and they don’t make sense even though you know they should. That’s what it feels like for the main character in Bicycle, and that’s......

This weekend column is brought to you by the founders of Niceties Tokens, Liz and Pete of Team Nice. 10. Integrity So about Jacqui Smith and the… erm… ‘crazy drug fuelled youth of half the cabinet’. Don’t you just cringe when politicians are backed in to a corner and have to squirm? Then they go back, have a meeting with the rest of the cabinet to orchestrate their best response. So it would seem......

This week ended with the launch of the seventh and final Harry Potter installation. But while the world was consumed with Pottermania, it's important to remember that there were more serious things going on in the world, too – two of them in -Ist cities. Sampaist was shocked when a passenger jet crashed into the center of Sao Paulo, killing at least 200 people. The airplane, an Airbus A320, skidded off the runway at the......

They've taken over our music, they'll be taking over our phones later on in the year, but now partnered with Channel 4 and many others Apple have taken over our weekends by absolutely stomping through Saturday night with intimate performances at the ICA from Beardyman, Mutya Buena and Groove Armada. There are no ticket retailers, there are no touts, these are the hottest tickets in town and you can only get them from the......

If you played video games in the 90s, chances are that you also read Digitiser, Channel 4's Teletext games magazine. It was renowned not only for its incisive, honest gaming news, but also for the surreal humour of lead writer Mr. Biffo, which was responsible for breaking the brains of teenagers all over the land. Snakes in hoodies would "cuss each other bad" alongside the letters page, Insincere Dave analysed the day's news, and......

It seems we're writing more and more about London Transport these days. Now it's the turn of the London Assembly to have their say: they want to make buses safer. Isn't that nice of them? So they're asking you, British public and residents of London how to make it crime free and a happy travel experience. Some would call this forward thinking. Others might say it was passing the buck. So, the crime free......

Like many a Londoner, you're probably aware that there's a fair amount of crime in this lovely city of ours. In fact, if you're a victim of one of the 917,661 crimes in London in the past year, you're probably shocked to hear that London isn't number one in Britain's burglary league tables. We're still top five though. Only Nottingham, Leeds and Hull are more burglary-ridden, according to a new report by insurance company......

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......

Such was the misinformed delighted squeal from the official Big Brother forum today as the first shots of 2007’s house of pain in Elstree were revealed. Yep, this year it’s all arse about face; the fridge is in the garden, the bath is in the living room, the chickens are encased in glass. "Modernistic sur-reality" apparently. It’s not yet clear where the cooker actually is but we can all be put out of our......

LAist is experimenting with blogging dates from J-Date, but finds the best men are found offline. Some date vicariously online and that is one reason why porn is big -- really freaking big -- so they ask if they should cover XXX since the heart of it lays in the city's San Fernando Valley. A writer grapples with her food porn photography obsession, another gets censored on Flickr, one gets scooped by the LA......