• Londonist pondered who might be the next sponsors of the London Eye and whether or not readers would be willing to donate £1,000 each for a Londonist Eye.
• Shanghaiist was shocked to find a cameltoe in the city's only English-language paper.
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Continue Reading "Week Around the -Ists"

Torontoist discovered their city's most ridiculous holiday lights setup, with 80,000 lights and two––two!––synchronized music routines. Naturally, they snagged a video. Chicago tragically loses one of its most recognizable neighborhood icons, the pigeon man of Lincoln Square. LAPD leaves body in car at crash scene, then tows it. Massachusetts plus mullet equals PR mayhem. Londonist sleeps in a Haunted plague pit. UC Berkeley students strip naked and race through campus, NSFW floppiness ensues. Phillyist......

Heads up people: the East London Line closes this Saturday. It will undergo a magical transformation that will take rather a long time but the line will reemerge from a 3 year chrysalis as a beautiful section of the newly tangerine London Overground network, linking the North and East London railways. You'll eventually be able to travel from Richmond in the West all the way round in a massive arterial horseshoe via the existing......

Curious and curiouser: we got a tip-off from a mysterious source that the District Line had a distinct lack of advertising over the weekend. Could this have anything to do with Buy Nothing Day, which took place on Saturday? Those baffling adverts coyly suggesting you need more fibre in your diet - or maybe it's oestrogen or hair that you're lacking - all seemed to have disappeared, leaving the carriages refreshingly blank and clear.......

At Londonist we are often chuffed when Londoners 'do quite well'. At least initially. Like most Brits, we love The Underdog - right up until that moment when they become A Loser. Then we slag them off vitriolically, sit arms-crossed in a huff on our collective sofa, mumble that we "never liked them anyway" and promptly forget all about them when the next Underdog comes along. What's cockney for 'schadenfreude' anyway? When Shirley MacLaine......

We know, it's hardly shock anymore if you hear that underground lines have major delays. Londoners are pretty used to that. But it gets a bit more serious when it's due to issues with the emergency brakes. This is quite scary. The lines in question are the Circle, Hammersmith and City and the District which all affect each other. As they cover pretty much half of London this causes serious problems. But TFL and......

We all knew it was coming. Yet another tube strike. As of 6pm this evening, we're going to see 72 hours of chaos as more than 2,300 RMT members have promised to walk out. (The TFL website says services will not return to normal until Friday morning.) And what can we do about it? Absolutely nothing. We've been told to 'finish our journeys by 5pm or jump on the DLR'. So what's the deal?......

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

The second of our interviews with the Tory candidates for London Mayor. Previously, Andrew Boff. Victoria Borwick is a born and bred London lass whose Mayoral campaign carries the tagline 'A red head not Red Ken'. She has 25 years of management experience and is currently a councillor for Kensington and Chelsea. She has four children, doesn't like tinny techno and knows a thing or two about Cleopatra's Needle. But does she have the......

We at the Gothamist network would like to express our heartfelt wishes to the people of Minnesota in the days after their tragic bridge collapse. We're not trying to discount the severity of the accident by making note of it in opposition to our usual -Ist lightheartedness – we just wanted to take a moment and recognize those affected last week. After the Minneapolis bridge collapse, Bostonist did a little research and found that Massachusetts......

If you carry a handbag on a regular basis, we're sure that, like us, you've had the joyful experience of finding a misplaced fiver tucked into a corner, or a pack of gum just when you fancy a piece, or your favourite lipgloss which you'd written off as lost. Handbags can be a treasure trove of hidden objects, and it's always delightful to find something unexpected inside. An elderly widower in Woking found treasure......

Due to the crazy rain today, there have been mass closures around throughout London Underground. As of 14:15, the following stations have been closed due to flooding: Shepherd's Bush (Central Line) Turnpike Lane Victoria (Circle & District Lines only) Paddington (Circle Line only) Gants Hill South Kensington Kilburn Tooting Broadway Vauxhall Turnham Green Tooting Bec Clapham Common Colliers Wood North Ealing (Westbound services only) Hammersmith - Dist & Pic lines (Eastbound services only) The following......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 9th July 1968: The Hayward art gallery on the South Bank is opened by the Queen. Tuesday – 10th July 1958: Britain’s first parking meters are installed in Mayfair. Soon there would be 625 of them in the district, charging 6 pence per hour. Wednesday – 11th July 1848: Waterloo Station is opened. The original station would survive just 52 years until 1900, when it would be......

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......

El-Shaddai are very excited. Particularly Dr Ramson and his wife, Pastor Linda, founders of and pastors for this “non-denominational, Christ-centred” church. They've just spent £5m on a shiny new London home. This weekend, they'll be meeting their flock in the splendid surroundings of Golders Green Hippodrome, former home of the BBC Concert Orchestra. This is a considerable step up from borrowing bits of UEL or faceless Fairfield Halls. Yep, the Beeb wanted out of......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

Dame Kelly Holmes was on the radio a little while ago exhorting girls to get involved in sport. We're not entirely sure that roller derby was what she was thinking of at the time, but a group of daring Londoners are keen to welcome new female recruits to their weekly Saturday afternoon practice sessions. Let's be clear about one thing before we start - roller derby is a contact sport and participants can expect......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

Londonist loves a good recycling story.We found out today that there are apparently 75 million old mobile phones hanging around in the UK. Surely something a bit better than "keep it in a drawer and forget about it" can be done with all those old Nokia 3210s? Apart from using them as impromptu weapons in case of a break in, of course. And think about old computers as well - we're hanging onto our......

Spring is when we get busy here in the Ist-A-Verse. Very busy. But, after staying bundled-up indoors all winter, it's nice for us to be out, about, and collecting things to write about for you. Here's a glimpse at what's been keeping your favorite citybloggers busily away from home and out of bed. For LAist, strong winds attacked LA on the same day the Feds raided the Crips. Not to fear, though: the Japanese version......

Ross got in contact with us to let us know that the registration deadline for the UK Dodgeball Championships (whole teams only) had been extended until Friday. While we had him around we thought we'd ask him a few questions about his adventure sports club, 8th Day. Tell us what 8th Day is all about. It's a sport and adventure club for people who want to make the most of their free time. It's......

The stuff you find on the tube: An unpublished novel by renowned author Jeanette Winterson has been found at an Underground station in south London. The Stone Gods, by the writer of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, is not due to be published until September. Martha Oster, 27, said she was "amazed" when she found the 134-page manuscript lying on a bench at Balham station on Wednesday night. Penguin claim it was accidentally......

If you were wondering what was going on with the closure of the Circle and District lines this morning, the answer isn't pretty: A woman has been found dead near Paddington Tube station. The body was discovered just before 0800 GMT and has caused the closure of two lines. British Transport Police (BTP) are investigating the incident and have appealed for anyone with information to come forward. Supt Ellie Bird from the BTP said......

Our weekend roundup of all that's good in London blogs While most bloggers, us included, cocked a sarcastic snook at the Starbucks store locator, Diamond Geezer has, typically, been more inventive. He's put together a crude map of London showing the number of outlets per postal district. W1, naturally, has the most with 32, whereas poor/lucky RM1, BR1 and SM1 only have one each. Our old friend Brian, the blogging pigeon, did some investigative journalism......

The Independent reports that the fashion sense of six men now on trial for conspiracy to commit murder on London transport in July 2005 had been frequently observed by police on several occasions. This week's court proceedings show that the apparel of the men was carefully analyzed by Scotland Yard. Scotland Yard began their "fashion study" by secretly photographing a camping trip taken by the men to the Lake District in May 2004. The......

Richmond council are hitting 4x4 drivers hard. Seamus Heaney has won the 2006 TS Eliot Prize with his District and Circle collection. A London poker club owner has been convicted of violating gambling laws. Michael Mann and Johnny Depp are having a beef over a film version of Alexander Litvinenko's demise. And this ridiculously written article tells the story of a woman chucked off a bus for being too tall. Photo taken from pfig's......

Yahoo: Police evacuated part of the city of London financial district near the Bank of England on Thursday because of a suspect package near a Turkish bank. "We were alerted to the incident shortly after 3.30 p.m. and officers are on the scene," a spokesman for the City of London police said. He said the suspect package was on Prince's Street which is next to the Bank of England. He did not name the......

Over the last eight months we’ve debated the impending demise of London’s Theatre Museum, the only dedicated museum of its kind in the country. And we’ve not been alone – MPs, directors of other European museums and high-profile luvvies have also weighed in on the debate with the museum’s owners (the V&A Museum). Was the threatened closure of the museum in the heart of London’s theatre district a travesty, or was it an opportunity......

This Day In London’s History 1890: Public opening of the world’s first ‘deep-level’ electric tube line, running between Stockwell and King William Street. Although the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railways had opened several underground tube lines since 1863, these were relatively shallow ‘cut-and-cover’-type lines. Following advances in tunnelling techniques later in the century, it became possible to construct much deeper lines, and the City & South London Railway was opened to the public on......

Welcome to our in-no-way contrived, colour-coded guide to today's Olympic news. Blue: Certainly not. Games organisers are delighted to report that public support for the games is at an all-time high. 79% of us think the 2012 Olympics are a jolly good thing. Black: Your finances could be well and truly in the black if you win the Olympic lottery scratchcard launched today. Red: Britain will not seek to criminalise the use of performance......