Have you any idea how hard it it to write a story about public urination without some sort of pun in the title? Have you? No, we didn’t think so. Ah, the trials of frivolous blogging. Anyway, news reaches us today of a brave and fearless shopkeeper who is filming and shaming a persistent piddler. The owner of an upholstery workshop in Battersea is so irate at the antics of the anonymous piss artist that......

We fell in love with Black Cab Sessions the moment we first heard of them. How could we not? Taking a drive around the best city in the world (okay, we're biased, yes) in a design classic with some of our favourite bands rockin' out in the back seat: it's exactly how we'd like to spend a lazy afternoon. Since we generally are unable to scrape together enough coins to even steal sideways glances......

If you could get the Sarcasts (Digg), the Grunts (YouTube) and the Silent (Londonist’s forgotten readers’ forum) into a room together, what would you hear? The Science Museum might have the answer. New installation ‘The Listening Post’ slaps up random content from hundreds of chat rooms simultaneously, bringing you an orgy of words. “It is an awe-inspiring ‘portrait of chat’,” says the press release. Alan Partridge is having wet dreams. The installation debuted in......

A group of masked protesters will gather outside the Church of Scientology's centres in London on Sunday morning at 11am, starting at the centre on Queen Victoria St before moving on to the Goodge St location. But what has prompted this IRL display of anger? The protests - which will take place in various other countries on the same day - are the latest and strangest episode in an all-out war between the famously......

Macabre London: First, man denies murdering model but admits to necrophilia; then a headless corpse turns up in northwest London. We find ourselves suspiciously eyeing other commuters on our Tube ride home this evening. Corrupt London: We know that London is ranked first on all kinds of lovely lists. But we’d prefer to forgo the dubious distinction of being first in rates of debit and credit card fraud. Tonally challenged London: Londonist thinks it’s......

Our weekly roundup of film reviews returns, courtesy of James Bryan… After its Statue of Liberty beheading sensation of a trailer, the internet-hyped Cloverfield finally arrives. For the uninitiated, the film follows a group of young hip New Yorkers whose loft party is rudely interrupted when a big scary monster decides to munch his (her?) way through Manhattan. The big idea is that it’s all shot as if captured on one of the characters......

Ken Livingstone's certainly had a tough few weeks. For starters, Boris Johnson finally began to get his act together on a few fronts. He's got a new website, a new team, and he's had some success in generating noise around policy issues - most notably, knife crime. Still, when push came to shove, Ken came out well on ITV's first Mayoral debate, where - as expected - he clearly knew more than his opponents.......

If our enthusiastic dance previews didn't inspire you to go as far as actually parting with cash for contemporary dance then perhaps you could cut your teeth on free events happening as part of London's International Festival of Contemporary Dance: Dance Umbrella. If you work near Liverpool Street then, this lunchtime or any lunchtime in the next 29 days, you can stumble across Paul-Andre Fortier performing "Solo 30x30" whilst you nip out for a......

Londonist was deeply shocked and saddened at the weekend when we learned of the death of promising Queens Park Rangers striker Ray Jones. Tomorrow would have been his nineteenth birthday, but just after midnight on Saturday morning a car he was travelling in collided with a double decker bus in East Ham and Jones, along with two of the four other occupants of the vehicle, Idris Olasupo and Jess Basilva, died from their injuries.......

If you travel in East London, this is a view you've probably seen a thousand times. But, unless you work for London Underground, you probably haven't seen it from quite that angle. It's is a tube driver's view from Aldgate East to Barking, and London Underground has just found out that drivers have been filming these videos and posting them to YouTube. Understandably, they're a bit worried. Our search on YouTube for "london underground......

Sickening news today of the case of a homeless man who was "happy slapped" to death for "a right laugh" in Stratford last September. The three men charged with Gary Turner's murder, all in their early twenties, apparently went on a violent spree that night attacking three people in total. The gang recorded their first attack on the passive, sleeping and intoxicated Mr Turner on a mobile phone and then returned several hours later......

While enjoying an ever-growing following in his native land, David Cross isn't the household name he deserves to be on our side of the Atlantic. This may change in a few weeks, however, as tonight marks the first performance in a ten-day residency for the American comedian at Oxford Street's 100 Club entitled "A Really Lovely Night Out With David Cross And Friends". Supporting his stand-up routine and earning their "and friends" title will......

It's a widely accepted fact that hospital food and airline food are about as bad as it gets. And if you've spent any time as a guest of the NHS lately, you'll likely be of the opinion that hospital food isn't getting any better. James "Smurf" Smith, a 21 year old currently recuperating at Hillingdon Hospital from a shattered pelvis and broken spine, is in agreement with you. He's been so disgusted with the......

I've discussed my disinclination to leave my house to see live music in this column before, along with the irony that I expect others to do the exact same thing to see me play. What can I say, I'm a fickle artist! It's not that I don't love and appreciate human beings making music right in front of me, but that there are so many factors that can get in the way of my......

One of Londonist’s favourite web 2.0 communities, last.fm, has just been bought up by American firm CBS for a rather tasty $280m (£142m). Whilst it may not have been sold for as much as other social networks (such as News Corp's £294m MySpace purchase and Google's $1.65bn buy-out of YouTube), it does mean that last.fm can stay in London and still keep its open source nature. Dave explained what Last.fm is all about much better......

The Dean of Southwark, The Very Revd Colin Slee, seems to have gotten a taste for being in hot water. In December he stoutly defended his allegedly drunk bishop who somehow staggered across London from an Irish Embassy Christmas bash to clamber into someone's car, chuck out baby toys and refuse to come out until forcibly removed. In February he used Youtube to call for the legalisation of drugs as a means of stopping......

We all love and hate the Tube, don’t we? On one hand it is an indispensable, magic, under earth fun-bus that transports us to all the wonderment and wide-eyed beauty that is London and its environs. On the other hand it is a fetid, overcrowded mess of the sinful and weary plebs that will sneeze on you, play their music too loud on their iPods or wait until it’s really crowded and try and......

So, Sarko finally beat Sego. As France faces a brave new dawn under Nicolas Sarkozy, our own Premier is also looking to the future as an announcement is expected on Thursday of removal vans heading for No.10. Tony Blair is always fond of new things, even going so far as to try out a new name for his own political party. Eager not to miss out on this weekend's 'newness' and 'frenchness', he has......

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......

Tony Blair has obviously been listening to a lot of Huey Lewis lately -- he thinks it’s hip to be square. And what is more squareishly hip than to broadcast your political party on YouTube in the hopes of attracting the Cool Kids? In the 58 second clip, Blair explains that Labour’s goal in broadcasting on their new YouTube channel, Labourvision, is "to enable you to hear unmediated, fresh, first-hand, what it is we are......

Eagle-eyed Londonist loyalists may have noticed that our obsession with Lucky Soul was reflected by BBC London who featured the band on the evening news a few weeks ago. A highlight of that little piece was a glimpse of the fantastic video for the new single 'Add Your Light To Mine, Baby', a YouTube version of which you can see below. As is now customary with Lucky Soul singles, we're celebrating the release by......

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......

We're guessing most of you are hungover from St. Patrick's Day. We are too. But still, we're going to muddle on through our green haze and give you (drum roll please...) this Week In -ists. We start with SFist which broke the -ist record for comments with nearly 500 comments on a post about our Mayor's girlfriend. She responded back on charges that she's not a "girl's girl" and, whoo boy-- the floodgates? They......

We love Richard Madeley. Without him there wouldn't be Alan Partridge. Come to think of it we're not sure there ever was a need for Partridge when you have such great Madelisms as this one to John Lydon: If I could throw a fishing rod into the corridors of time and reel you in, you'd throttle you, wouldn't you? Or the time he sat watching a guest stutter only to reply "You looked as......

Virgin have compiled a chart of the Top 11 Underground Transit Systems Throughout the World and guess which creaking ancient network of tunnels comes out on top? Yep, we're number one! They do make it sound quite plush: Cushioned seats. LED time displays hanging from the ceiling in stations indicate the number of minutes you need to wait before the next train. Eclectic station artwork... Oyster cards allow you to touch against a subway......

We have a couple of favourite online empires; Gothamist of course, who keep the virtual roof over our heads, but there's also Shiny Media who somehow manage to keep a large extended family of blogs running in a very professional manner without ever relying on knob jokes like we do. And when they do take a break from the blogface it's only to host lavish awards ceremonies like the one last night. Now we......

Here's something you don't get to do every day (unless you're in the SAS): Children's charity NCH is looking for more than 200 participants to abseil down 350ft (25 floors) from the top of the Union Jack Club at Waterloo. Wow. We reckon people would pay to do this even if the money was going to an evil cause. The best bit is that you can do it on your lunch hour: "The Union......

The new video by Lily Allen. Thanks to Samuel for letting us know it was on YouTube and for pointing out that She's from London. So is Londonist. We particularly enjoyed the use of the word 'twat'. American readers will probably think the puppet is cute. Try sitting next to one on the night bus home is all we have to say.......

We can't ignore a band with a lead singer called Scrappy Calloway and it's a bonus that we fell in love with her voice the second we heard it. Goodfinger from New York play Bar Rumba tonight and we're going to go along to see if the band deliver the goods live as they do on MySpace and ReverbNation. Tom Verlaine from Television called them "The future of New York music" while Sleazegrinder summed......

Magnus Magnusson died. What a great name he had. If only he'd been born in the 10th century his starter for ten would have been a Viking axe to the face. As it was the Reykjavik born Magnusson became the UK's grand inquisitor on the original run of the Beeb's Mastermind (as well as an expert on old Icelandic literature hence the pic). Arguably the most famous winner of Mastermind was a London cabbie......