The LL blog will be a lot like the LL column and e-mail: you'll find news and commentary on D.C. government and politics (and, every now and then, Maryland and Virginia) and the people behind the scenes. We'll also be debuting some new recurring features on the LL blog and here on City Desk soon. While City Paper's political news will move over to the Loose Lips blog, you can still expect to find good stories about life in the District here on City Desk—and of course, plenty of illuminating photos by Darrow Montgomery and other photographers.

Feel free to leave us your thoughts on the changes, either in the comments on the blog or by e-mailing me at mmadden(AT)washingtoncitypaper.com. Enjoy!

Did anyone hear all that noise on City Desk from about 8:40 this morning to about 2:48 in the afternoon? No? Well, that's the sound of Loose Lips columnist Mike DeBonis leaving the paper. We'll miss Mike. You can read his final column here, in which he surrenders the initials "LL."

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Witness the following comment in response to a recent post about a controversial mural in Mt. Pleasant.

This is great. We have spics arguing with spics over who's a more racist spic. This is like a frucking comedy- George Lopez is the ony thing that comes to mind. No one MSG and the Latin Queens are always fighting with each other. I hate that fact that you can do it freely in my country instead of chopping each other in coffee fields, yah dumbbasses.

Should the managers of City Desk allow such thoughts to be expressed here? Our staff is divided between slippery-slopers who don't want to dip their toes into the sort of judgments required to moderate the comments and community builders who want careful tending of the City Desk garden.

Any comments?

For the second year in a row, contributor Jeffry Cudlin won the arts criticism category for his work, which this year included the following: "Pine of the Times" about the Martin Puryear retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, "Sheet Smart" about the Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibit at the Phillips Collection, and "Pain by Numbers," a wrap-up of what D.C. museums did and didn't offer in 2008.

Editor Erik Wemple won first place for media reporting/criticism with his cover story "One Mission, Two Newsrooms" about the Washington Post's struggle to bridge the cultural and geographic divide between its print and online operations.

In the elusive "innovation/format buster" category, the cover story some loved and others hated—"Washington City Paper Files for Chapter 86 Content Bankruptcy"— also took home first-place honors. The piece by Wemple, Managing Editor Andrew Beaujon, and Asst. Managing Editor Jule Banville was written and presented in the form of a legal document spoofing both the changing nature of City Paper's journalism and and the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by our paper's owners, Creative Loafing.

Creative Loafing's Atlanta paper received second-place honors in the feature category for the first-person account, "Sober," by Thomas Wheatley. The Chicago Reader, also our sister paper, received two second-place awards. Ann Ford was so honored in the arts feature category for "Life Without a Script" and columnist Ben Jarovsky's "The Works" was named in the column (political) category

The AAN Awards are open to its 130 member papers. Most of the altweeklies in U.S. cities (plus a few in Canada) enter the contest each year. This year, the top all-time AAN Award winner, the L.A. Weekly, led the pack with four first-place awards. In the 14-year history of the awards, Washington City Paper has won the second-most overall awards in the top-circulation categories: 51.