Sestak! Our Bi-Weekly Political Roundup

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You know the drill by now Baltimore. Its hump day and after all that shite rain that fell yesterday you don’t feel like cooking and you’re anxious to get out of the house and get some tasty food and share pitchers of delicious beer with like-minded friendly people Station North.

This is why you’re bringing yourself down to Joe Squared tonight at 7 for the semi-monthly meeting of the Baltimore Chapter of Drinking Liberally. Just look for the table with the red, white, and blue bottle and pull up a chair.

Baltimore Drinking Liberally meets at Joe Squared tonight. 7 pm.

There’s actually not too many big headlines we need to fit in here today. The president named Elena Kagan as his SCOTUS nominee. It was a generally unsurprising pick and it’s a pretty good one. We like Kagan well enough, and we’re sure she’ll be confirmed sooner or later. Personally, we hope it’s later. We’d love nothing more than for the GOP to keep trotting out John Cornyn and Jeff Sessions all summer and let them make assholes of themselves. Let them scream and cry and fundraise on it all through the summer recess and then lose when congress comes back into session. This is very politically advantageous timing for the Democrats.

This oil spill bullshit is also bound to continue through the summer. The ideas ‘floating around’ for solving it don’t sound too clever right now. A ‘Top Hat’ and a ‘Junk Shot’ hardly seem like sound environmental policy. After this is finally contained and the cleanup has begun, BP, Halliburton and Transocean executives need to be publicly tarred and feathered… and then dragged out and shot just for good measure.

The best story of the week though is over at fivethirtyeight.com where new poll data show that Rep. Joe Sestak has come up with a slight lead over crotchety old self-interested flip flopping Republican-in-Dem-clothing monster Arlen Specter in the PA Democratic Senate Primary. With the election in less than a week, we hope our neighbors to the north finally wise up to old man Arlen’s grass-is-greener politics and toss him out on his ass in favor of a real Democrat.

As much as the Chop loves Obama, Biden, and Ed Rendell, we would gladly see them all thrown under the bus if it means a Sestak win on Tuesday. Specter’s switch to the Democratic party last year was backroom political deal-making of the worst sort, engineered right from the top, and we didn’t buy it for a second.

Also: Be sure to check out our submission to The Daily Camden, which hit the web today.
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Joe Squared is at 133 W. North Ave at the corner of Howard Street in Station North. Drinking Liberally meets on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month and begins at 7 pm, but attendees are free to arrive whenever is convenient.

The Daily Camden and 10 Mistakes

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You might think the Chop is all about liquor and rock music and the fairer sex and sleeping until noon and watching baseball, but you’d be wrong. We’re smrt. And we know all about business and technology and all junk like that.

So today we’re happy to announce that we’re guest-blogging over at folkmedia.org. Folk Media is a Baltimore based start-up which helps businesses and organizations market themselves on the web. Our topic is 10 Big Mistakes You May Be Making Online. How Businesses and Organizations Unwittingly Alienate Customers.

Head over there for your daily Chop today, and if you’re just arriving from the Folk Media site, welcome! Feel free to take a look around. Scroll down and see what we’ve been up to lately or click the Archives tab for some of the Chop’s greatest hits.

We’re also heading out to the Yard tonight to catch the O’s and the Mariners for a Tuesday bargain night/ Brian Matusz T-shirt Tuesday game. It’s also our night to take a snapshot for The Daily Camden over at Welcome to Baltimore, Hon. The Daily Camden is an ongoing photo project in which people from all over Baltimore submit a picture of Camden Yards every day of the season, game or no game, to build a collective photo record of the place we all think of as a second home throughout the 2010 season.

With Cliff Lee facing David Hernandez tonight, we very likely won’t be photographing the scoreboard.

Thoughts on Being a Grown-Up Punk

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Malcolm X was once asked what he thought of Socialism. His response; “Is it good for black people?”

It’s a simple, yet very profound sentiment.

The Buzzcocks are playing the Ottobar this Wednesday. The Chop will not be in attendance. We’ve already been very clear about our feelings on aging punk bands, and the Buzzcocks are definitely aging. The big idea on this tour is that they’re making it well-known that they intend to play their first two records in their entirety, and they’re not going to try to recycle any of that crap from the ’90’s that they tried to foist off on our generation of teenagers 15 years ago. We love the Buzzcocks, and they can really do no wrong in our eyes, but they make us consider what it means to be a grown-up punk.

One of the world's great punk bands was also high on style. The Buzzcocks in the late '70's.

Being an adult punk can’t just mean going around doing a pale impression of your teenage self. It can’t be listening to the same records over and over again. It can’t be tattoos, middle fingers, and a ‘no future’ mentality.

But it can’t mean giving up either. Grown up punks can never be satisfied with becoming their parents. Sitcoms, malls, and SUV’s are no way to live. Growing up punk has taught us all that we shouldn’t, cannot accept the status quo. In a lot of ways that old saying is true: If you’re not now, you never were.

We still feel conflicted though. So many times we feel like an undercover punk. Most days now there’s not so much as a one-inch button on our jacket by which we’d be recognizable. While we’ll never outgrow punk, we have outgrown high school tribalism.

To our mind though, a great example of how to be a grown up punk is Mark Andersen. Here is someone who has made himself a way to live out his ideals every day, and to continue fostering community and effecting change in so many positive ways. Being punk never meant changing the world. It means changing your world.

So now when we’re asked what we think of something, we’re forced to consider; “Is it good for punk people?”

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Buzzcocks play the Ottobar Wednesday, 5/10 5/12 with the Dollyrots and DJ King Gilbert. 2549 N Howard St. 8 pm doors.

The Chop Approves of Brunch

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It’s Mothers’ Day in Charm City, and that could only mean one thing; its time to sit down to brunch.

At this very moment, cooks all over Baltimore are scrambling massive quantities of eggs, bartenders are making sure the Champagne is well-chilled, and servers are already daydreaming about how to spend an apron full of tip money. While Mothers’ Day is very closely associated with brunch nationwide, this scene plays itself out here in town every Sunday, and most Saturdays too. Baltimoreans have fully embraced brunch culture, and if you’re looking for a late-morning repast on the weekends, its almost easier to ask yourself who doesn’t offer brunch around here?

Nothing says decadence like Pernod and eggs Florentine in a fancy hotel on Sunday morning.

The Chop approves of brunch. If you find yourself at a brunch table, you know that you’ve done something right. More than a meal, brunch is a lifestyle choice. Even more than that though, its a lifestyle choice that is almost exclusively the province of the urban middle and upper classes. You won’t find proper brunch offerings at Granny’s Country Kitchen in Podunksburg, WV. Likewise you’ll notice that most of your better options for brunch are more Manhattan than they are Bronx.

Its always been this way. According to some website we found, the English invented brunch near the turn of the century when their aristocratic, fox-hunting, Tory asses came back to the Manor after a ‘hunt’ and had their butlers lay table with a proper meal decidedly different from a traditional English supper. Supposedly the practice was adopted at places like Oxford and Cambridge when the Brits wanted to combine eating with all manner of WASP-y pursuits like tennis matches, crew rowing tournaments, yacht regattas, etc.

Some other website we found suggests that the popularity of brunch is in inverse proportion to the popularity of Churchgoing. This would explain why its so well favored by coastal elite types and not the ‘real’ ‘heartland’ Americans in the flyover states. Still other sources note the link between urbanites who make a habit of drinking heavily late into Saturday nights and look to a long, leisurely meal of fruits, carbs, and protiens (along with a couple of brunch cocktails) as the best remedy for a hangover. The Chop falls firmly into this category.

A little old-fashioned, just a touch elitist, Godless, gossipy, drunk and delicious. Is it any wonder the Chop, and Baltimore, approves of brunch?

Squidfire’s 10th Art Mart @ Fell’s Point Today

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Wow. We had such a good time yesterday walking around Flowermart looking for plants, looking at girls and mixing up Lemon Sticks, that we’re totally sold on the whole buy-locally-from-an-open-air-market idea. And it looks like we’re in luck again, because there’s no shortage of them today.

In addition to the Waverly Farmers’ Market which we get to as often as hangovers allow, we’re also going to check out the Really Really Free Market at 33rd and Guilford which is running concurrent today from 7 am to 1 pm. RRFM is a nationwide progressive movement started by San Francisco pinkos. You ought to know by now that if there’s one thing the Chop can get behind, it’s nationwide progressive movements started by SF pinkos. This one appears to be made up locally of Hopkins students, and their parents buy them nice things, so we’re looking to score.

Squidfire's 10th Art Mart takes place in the Fell's Point square today. 11 am- 6 pm.

But wait… there’s more! Just in case leftover Ikea lamps and obsolete televisions don’t satiate our hoarding appetite, we’re going down to Fell’s to check out Squidfire’s 10th Art Mart. Art Mart gets bigger and more successful with each installment and this time around it will feature over 50 artists and crafters and run from 11-6, rain or shine.

Odds are you’re probably aware of the huge DIY arts and crafts scene here in the city, but have only seen scattered examples of it around town or online. Art Mart is a great chance to take it all in at once and see what’s available in the world of handmade goods.

It’s a great feeling when someone says “Oh my God, that’s awesome! Where did you get that?”, and it feels even better to say “Its one of a kind. I got it at Art Mart.”