The Chop Approves of Colored Chinos

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Usually when we dispense style advice on this site, we’re doing nothing more than rehashing the tried and true basics along with a little local color and a lot of personal bias. Unlike a great number of bloggers operating in the menswear category, You’ll never see us hyping up a Gilt flash sale or suckling at the teat of Manhattan department stores.

So today’s post is a little unconventional in that it’s technically a half step above what qualifies as ‘basic’ style. Everybody’s got a pair of jeans, and almost everybody has a pair or two of khaki/greyish/neutral chinos to back them up with, but going out and spending $60 or so on a pair of colored pants is something of a leap of faith for most guys.

coloredchinos

This Summer it’s a leap we’re making and embracing, and colored chinos have become one of our favorite hot-weather looks.

For us, it’s almost out of bare necessity. We’re still stubborn about embracing shorts, and if you’re wearing shorts around (especially cargo shorts) and you’re over the age of 15 you can assume we’re quietly judging you at all times. But still, wearing slim jeans all day every day during the Summer months is also ill advised for obvious reasons. On top of that, our adherence for the understated basics has led to a closet full of white/whitish/neutral pattern shirts at the Chophouse.

So with it being too hot to add in sweaters and jackets and ties for color, we’ve been forced to add color to our pants, and a little goes a long way. We found the above image at deanstreetsociety.com in a colored chinos post by personal stylist Hilary Rushford and it illustrates perfectly how to pull off colored pants in Baltimore City.

These guys are both well dressed and comfortable, and you can put this look together in about 30 seconds to keep yourself cool all Summer. The only tsk-tsk detail we can spot is that the guy on the left hasn’t got any socks. If we’ve said it once we’ve said it a thousand times: Socks Are Not Optional.

Ice in the Urinals

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Welp, it’s Summer. It’s the Summerest part of Summer; Fourth of July week. It’s hot. Everything in the world is sticky and stinky and miserable and disgusting. It rains every day now for some stupid reason and then the sun heats up the rain in the ground and you can’t breathe and everyone gets steamed to death.

It’s the time of year when you shower 3 times a day and step out of the shower sweaty. People post pictures of their dashboard thermometers online and say things like ‘It’s not the heat it’s the HUMIDITY!” It’s enough to drive a man crazy, and sometimes the only escape is to the cool embrace of the barstool and a frosted mug (or 3) of cheap watery Boh.

And it’s after those three Bohs that with a little luck we encounter one of the most peculiar and practical traditions of barroom culture: ice in the urinals.

ice cubes in a urinal

A common sight in certain Baltimore taverns.

Loading up the pissers with ice cubes is definitely a sure sign that you’re in a real, legitimate dive bar and not a faux-dive or dive-themed bar. No one knows who that clever barman was who first heaved a bucket of ice into the trough or when he did it, but since then this little trick has been a perennial favorite of bar owners who know their plumbing is shitty but just can’t afford or be bothered to fix it. It’s a great irony that this humble workingman’s solution to bathroom odor actually works more effectively than most commercial janitorial supplies found in more respectable establishments.

That is, after all, the purpose of the icy urinal. It’s a DIY deodorizer. Keeping urine freezing cold goes a long way toward neutralizing the smell and not allowing it to rise in the atmosphere, especially in cheap corner bars which usually haven’t got the best air conditioning. It’s been the Chop’s experience that when bars use urinal cakes in the dog days of Summer, the whole restroom just ends up smelling like piss-cakes when guys fail to flush regularly.

And therein lies the twofold genius of ice: as it melts, it slowly runs through the urinal’s integral trap providing a kind of time-released flush action and preventing a pool of concentrated piss from forming in the fixture when it’s used repeatedly without flushing, or when it’s too broken to flush properly.

So the next time you unzip and find yourself facing a pile of ice cubes, you’ll know why they’re there and what they’re doing. And by the way… don’t ever attempt to flush a urinal that’s full of ice, because if it is working properly it may overflow onto your shoes.

Bike Maintenance 101

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A while back we lamented that a lot of simple household tasks go uncompleted around here because we have only a few very basic tools and lack a good workbench. We still don’t own a workbench, and so far we’re 0-for-2 on DIY carpentry projects, but we decided that when it came to the bike, we weren’t going to be so complacent about it.

We’ve had our current bike for a little over a year now, and between staying for months on end in the basement while we’re at sea and sucking up all the grime and grit of Baltimore’s streets on a daily basis when we’re home, it had begun to squeak pretty badly. Our default solution of just spray WD-40 all over the motherfucker was becoming less and less effective, but without a few key tools it was about all we could do. So instead of taking it to a shop for a tune up we decided to suck it up and hit up Amazon for a tool kit and repair stand.

The Chop's bike, ready for maintenance.

The Chop’s bike, ready for maintenance.

For someone like us who owned only the tools required to fix a flat, this was a great option. Buying tools piecemeal can run into money really quickly so dropping $65 for the kit and stand seems like a bargain, especially when compared to taking the bike in to a shop and paying labor costs a couple times a year.

We’ve got a fair amount of mechanical skill, and with tools at the ready we were almost prepared to begin, but first we thought it might be a good idea to check out a few YouTube videos to see exactly what we were about to dive into. YouTube can be a real cesspool for things like how-to videos, because many of the top results are clogged up by mega-how-to websites and are little more than ads. Still others are a little too amateurish in production, with people who know how to fix a bicycle but aren’t necessarily the best at being in front of a camera.

One of the better series’ we found was the how-to videos from nationwide bike shop chain Performance Bicycle. They’ve got over 40 videos which range from 2 to 8 minutes and are all well produced and relevant. Also helpful was the channel of online cheap-bike retailer RoadBikeOutlet, which are all well shot and long enough to be complete but short enough to reference mid-fix. If you’re interested in basic maintenance, go ahead and bookmark those now.

To make a long story short, we stripped and cleaned the pedals, crank arms, sprocket, chain and bottom bracket, as well as rotating the tires which had begun to wear unevenly. After a few hours our bike is riding like new again, and we feel just a little smarter and more accomplished for having tackled the job at home.

Baltimore Bike Party & Afterparty @ Lexington Market Tonight

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Tonight is the final Friday of the month and that means it’s time for the June ride of the Baltimore Bike Party. Tonight’s theme is the 80’s, so be sure you don’t get your legwarmers and parachute pants caught in the chain!

The ride begins at the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon with cyclists meeting in the north quadrant of the park at 7 pm and everyone gets underway at 7:30. This month’s route is a not-too-long but just-long enough 8 mile course with minimal hills through central and west Baltimore with what’s shaping up to be the biggest afterparty yet in the parking lot of Lexington Market. You can view the map below, and find more helpful information on the Bike Party’s site.


View June BBP route in a larger map

In other bike-related news, we’re happy to announce we’ve got another guest post up on Car Free Baltimore this week. After a hiatus a while back CFB is alive and well and our post this week is just in time for Summer on the topic of car-free vacations.

In it we discuss how finding the right hotel and doing a little advance planning can eliminate the need for even the staunchest car advocate to drive during a vacation, and break down what it costs to stay behind the wheel during a typical week-long summer holiday.

Click on over and check it out.

TV Party Tonight, Part II

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A week ago today we told you about the Apple TV we recently hooked up in our living room. It’s a love/hate relationship so far, and it’s still developing.

Instead of going whole hog and Applefying every TV in the house we decided to Pick up a Vizio Co-Star box for the bedroom and pit the two devices against one another in a real-world head to head duel. So far we’ve got a love/hate relationship going with that too, although we’re pleased to report it’s a little more love than hate.

The Co-Star integrates seamlessly with your TV and cable box.

The first thing to love is the remote. We mentioned that we’re able to control our Apple TV from our phone, with no net gain in the number of remote controls clogging up the coffee table, but the Co-Star’s remote has complete functionality for TV, the cable box, DVR’s, DVD and Blu-Ray players and about anything else you might want to hook up to your TV making it a truly universal remote and allowing us to hide all our other remotes in a drawer. Score! The remote also has a full qwerty keyboard on the back which is a crucial feature, even if it does take a little getting used to.

The main reason we bought boxes to begin with was to stream Netflix, and it couldn’t be easier than with this remote, which has a dedicated Netflix button right on its face, as well as several other launch and memory buttons, including one for Live TV. We can even switch off the living room TV and go to bed and pick up what we were watching mid-stream without missing a beat.

Both sides of a Co-Star remote.

The one area in which the remote needs dramatic improvement though is its touchpad. You can control the cursor on the screen by touching a pad on the remote, but it is usually too sensitive and then sometimes not sensitive enough. If it worked even half as well as the one on our laptop it would be a dramatic improvement and for a product this high-tech it feels like a very cheap feature. The remote also pairs to the Co-Star box via bluetooth, so in theory you shouldn’t have to point it toward the TV, but we’ve found that when typing on the keyboard you need a clear path between the box and remote.

The Co-Star runs Google TV, which means it features Google Chrome and allows you to surf the entire Web. This is a feature that is a glaring omission from Apple TV, and is necessary if you want to stream video from sites that aren’t YouTube or Vimeo, so it’s invaluable to have and becomes even better the more we get used to using it.

Another key difference from Apple is that when you access the Google Play Store, you actually can download additional apps to the Co-Star. It’s clear that this tech is still young yet, but we downloaded the Redbox app for instance, which is helpful for opening up streaming options. As more apps are developed, the worth of a Google TV device will improve.

Unfortunately the Co-Star does have some similarity to Apple TV in that it’s mostly a platform to get you to buy things. It even offers universal search that tells you where movies are available and how much they’ll cost. Whereas Apple is geared toward Hulu Plus Subscribers, Google has thrown in its lot with Amazon Prime/Amazon instant video. We’re not quite sure which of those two would be a better fit for our house, but subscribing to all three seems a little excessive, especially when you consider we’ve still got cable with on-demand. Trying to access regular Hulu from the Chrome browser is not an option, and all it gives you is a message that says ‘No no no… gotta subscribe to Plus cheapskate.’ It’s the kind of thing that is a reminder of just how deeply the big internet companies want to get into your pocket.

Beyond Netflix, Amazon and Chrome, the Co-Star is something of a disappointment. One of its big selling points is M-Go for Movies, but all it’s got now when you press that button is a brief trailer that says M-Go is coming soon. It’s also got some sort of video game app that doesn’t interest us and is another thing to spend money on.

One feature that we’d love to have and that neither one of our devices offers is an integrated DVR. It doesn’t need to be a giant 6 terrabyte hard drive or anything, but having 30-60 gigabytes built in to record a movie or a sporting event from the TV isn’t asking for much. We’re no expert but we feel like they could even put that in at the same price and keep the product the same size. Imagine putting your iPhone on top of the box… and then stripping away everything that’s not the memory. That’s how little you would have to add to it. But of course the more you record from TV, the less content you’re paying to stream, and that’s what the set-top box game is all about.

We like the Co-Star. We even like it a little better than the Apple TV. We’d recommend it to a friend at $99. But even though we love/hate it, we don’t love it.