Merry Christmas! (Or, if you’re not so much into the whole Christmas thing, Happy Tuesday!) We hope you’re having a very lovely Christmas day. If you need a break from the family madness, here are a few things you might want to take a peek at. On TV, Londonist likes: Top of the Pops Christmas Special (BBC1, 13:30-4:30)) Fearne Cotton and Reggie Yates present this look at the year’s most popular acts – and......

SFist witnessed a new apartment building tszuj the skyline with spectacular, gaudy turquoise aplomb, the (informal) renaming of the Mission/SOMA neighborhood border, the return of the Maltese Falcon, the Mayor Gavin Newsom mea culpa-ing over his Hawaiian getaway during the oil spill, and double-decker buses hitting the streets of San Francisco. Oh, and some baseball player named Barry Bonds is a liar whose pants, it seems, are totally on fire. LAist continues to cover the......

Due to earlier technical vexations of a non-Stratford-related variety, Monday Miscellanea is a bit later than usual today... This Week In London’s History Monday – 12th November 1974: A 9lb salmon is caught in the Thames – the first time that such a fish has been caught in the dirty old river since 1834 – and sent to the British Museum for identification. Improvements in the water quality are hailed. Tuesday – 13th November......

We're delighted to present the first in a series of touch-ups from the Something Awful forums. Each day this week, we'll post another image from this talented pool of photoshoppers. We'd like you to vote for your favourites by clicking the 'recommend this' link at the bottom of any image that makes you smirk. We'll be awarding a small prize to whoever gets the most votes and will announce the winner next week. Today,......

Faithful to its abundant exclamation points, new play iAy Carmela! opens tonight, at the Shaw Theatre in Kings Cross, with a gala event. As we like to grab all opportunities by the balls, we catch director Tom Wright (above right, being grabbed by the balls) for a quick chat about the Spanish Civil War, vaudeville, fart jokes and 1930 fuel economics. Tell us a bit about the play... iAy Carmela! was written by a......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Wednesday The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghoutir has fourteen books under his belt and has been described by Edward Said as “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement we now have”. Tonight Barghouti will give a talk on the nature of exile, read his poetry (in English) and a short extract from I......

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......