We flagged this up in London On The Cheap but it's so good we're telling you again. The Temple is having an open weekend this weekend. Through a doorway off Fleet Street, the Temple is home to two of England’s four the Inns of Court; The Inner and Middle Temple, as well as Da Vinci Code tourist attraction, round Temple Church. It was home to the Knights Templar and is generally steeped in history,......

Right, so you're either saving up to blow the last of the December salary on one helluva NYE out or you're just stony broke after Christmas/sales shopping. Either way, unless you're happy to simply hibernate for the week here are some ideas for New Year jollity on a budget. New Year's Eve: Follow our top tips and gird your loins for the massive fireworks display along the Thames, focusing on the London Eye and......

Just out the Van: Lights, Music, Words, Action - It’s Book Slam time again with Guatam Malkani, author of the Londonstani, Salena Godden, writer, singer, and raconteur, and Iman, winner of the National Music Award. This Thursday at Neighbourhood, 6.30pm till late, 12 Aclam Road, W10 5QZ, £5 in advance or £6 on the door. Fresh Next Week: Michael Palin leads a reading from Another Sky, a new collection of work by writers whose lives......

LAist is flashing a sad peace out to their editor Carolyn Kellogg with one hand and bumping knuckles with their new head typist L.A. blogger king Tony Pierce with the other. Where do ist editors go when they hang up the 'editorial we'? They take on MySpace, apparently. At least Ben Brown does. Austinist reminds of the just rewards of less savory careers this week and then they witness the Arctic Monkeys and We Are......

The millions and millions of Londoners who have been to see The Da Vinci Code (sadly not as bad as we'd hoped it would be) or X-Men 3 (happily, not as bad as we'd feared it would be) or any other major release over the past couple of weeks have been treated to TfL's new advert, showing a day in the life of a young man-about-town as he uses the many forms of public transport......

Remember on The Day Today when Chris Morris covered stranded train passengers going feral? It came close to happening over the weekend: More than 200 people were trapped underground for two hours when a Tube train got stuck between stations. Police were called at 0115 BST on Tuesday, after a Victoria Line train stopped between Highbury and Islington and Finsbury Park in north London. London Underground tried to get it moving again, but it......

This week's FFN is written by our new recruit Ben, who has stepped into the breach following the call from our readers last week not to scrap the weekly roundup. This week’s roundup includes a big summer blockbuster (X-men 3 – The Last Stand), a rubbish comedy (Friends With Money) and a film about a monkey (Curious George). Perhaps you ought to go to the theatre instead. Or better still you could rent “Ghost”......

Have you worked out Peter Bradshaw's hidden code yet? In his review of The Da Vinci Code in today's Guardian, Bradders wraps up his rather disturbing critique of the Ron Howard conspiracy flick with this even more disturbing revelation: Well, every decoding is another encoding, as the structuralists used to say, and here is a paragraph by Leonardo about cryptography I have discovered in the British Library... We then get a lengthy passage about......

Public Enemy frontman Chuck D's line "don't believe the hype" is up there as an aphorism which cuts to the quick and right down to size. With this in mind, approach if you will the unbelievable buzz surrounding the launch of the Da Vinci Code film. Branded Eurostar trains, 'on the trail of the Da Vinci Code' coach tours, and now this – a note left by Tom Hanks, who plays protagonist Robert Langdon,......

After getting thoroughly soaked this morning on the way to work (TV Troll's tolerance for H2O is somewhere around the level of the Wicked Witch of the West's) , we are in need of a nice night at home in front of the telly - and what a night it will be, oh yes. The problem is going to be deciding which channel to watch. For those who fancy a lot of back-slapping, a......

As of next month the Tube will run 30 minutes later on Friday and Saturday nights and start one hour later on Saturday mornings. The four men charged with attempting to carry out bomb attacks in London on 21 July last year are due up in court today. "Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought." Yes, the Da Vinci Code judgment code has been cracked. Find out how and what it means here. A new......

Like a bad penny or a persistent STD The Da Vinci Code refuses to go away. Now the bloody judge who oversaw the 'hey we're all here to make money so let's have a court case' plagiarism case concerning the most widely read book since Ladybird's Peter and Jane series (and for some the only book they've read since Ladybird's Peter and Jane series) has put his own code into the written judgment -......

A London Underground security chief has said that he thinks security scanners on the Tube would be "Impractical". Well, duh. The London Assembly has said that Londoners should have more control over "the development of local economies, the delivery of services and facilities, and the protection of their environment". The River police have got themselves a new pontoon in Wapping. It's being towed into place down the river today. The London Underground map lost out......

Some of the people who were present at the protests at the Danish Embassy last month will be arrested 'in the near future' the Crown Prosecution Service has said. Passengers on a flight from London to Gothenburg were held at gunpoint when they reached Landvetter airport yesterday, while two masked men robbed the plane of a large sum of foreign currency. Police are appealing for witnesses to the fatal shooting of a man, 20, and......

Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code is due out on May 19th but in true Dan Brown style there may be one more twist in the tale before we get to that point. Next week Brown is up in High Court on charges of plagiarism brought agaist him by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,the authors of the (very good) non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Their complaint is obvious if a......

Say it ain't so! TV Troll's two favourite telly talent shows, X Factor (Sat 6.40pm/9.10pm ITV1) and Strictly Come Dancing (Sat 6.30pm/9.20pm BBC1) have their series finales this week. We'll be stuck in front of the glowing screen, frantically flicking between the two, trying to get as much performance footage and as little Brucie/Tess/Kate in as possible. Expect to see smoke rising from the remote. Predicting a winner for either show is going to......

Ah, the Royal Institution. Not a latter-day Bedlam for the blue of blood, but one of London’s foremost scientific centres of excellence. It was here that a certain Mr Faraday cobbled together the first electric generator and changed the world forever. The venerable organisation has just announced its autumn schedule of public events (another of Faraday’s legacies). If you’ve never been along before, we suggest that you make like a boffin and get down......

Tourists take note: as of this week you'll have to travel to sunny Lincoln to see Westminster Abbey. And it's all thanks to Dan Brown. Yes the Da Vinci Code debacle continues thanks to the Hollywood version currently being filmed with Tom Hanks as the dashing hero. Hanks and director Ron Howard are currently over here shooting the adaptation but ran into a bit of trouble when Westminster Abbey turned down an approach from......

Londonist really misses It’s A Knockout. We can’t really remember if as a country we were any good, but we suspect that we were crap at it like everything else. Still at least the playing field was leveled back in the day of Stuart Hall thanks to the costumes and overall stupidity factor. These days the best we can do is remind the French that we used to be good at beating Napoleon which......

Why has Westminster Abbey decided to embroil itself in the ongoing Da Vinci Code argument? We're hoping that it might be because it's getting close to the summer and they need to bring in a few extra tourist greenbacks. In which case: well done Westminster Abbey, we salute your entrepreneurial spirit. Unfortunately, we suspect that the real reason the Abbey has "armed marshals with leaflets to tell tourists exactly what the novel got wrong,"......

Commuters on the Brighton to Victoria line are being encouraged to raise their weary heads from The Da Vinci Code and look for wildlife instead. According to the Telegraph, the train operators are to give out free wildlife guides on 10 of the country's busiest routes, including the Brighton one. Among the fauna on offer are: ... herons, cormorants and gulls on the Thames at Battersea, foxes and grey squirrels in the suburbs and......

It's 2005 and still the 'Da Vinci Code' stories keep coming. This time the claim is that the novel has helped the fortunes of Eurostar. The train operator released figures yesterday that showed 15% more people travelled on the line in 2004 than they did in 2003. And, of course, some of this is down to the exploits of the ruggedly handsome Professor Robert Langdon and his beautiful Parisian cryptologist sidekick Sophie Neveu. "We......