Where’s Snowden? Our Bi-Weekly Political Roundup

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Seen the news lately, Baltimore? It’s pretty much the Snowden show.

That’s not entirely true. Actually there’s been a lot going on in the news this week between the Supreme Court, Sylvio Berlusconi going to jail for bunga bunga-ing underage prostitutes, The trial of George Zimmerman, Nelson Mandela taken sick, oh… and our distinguished madame mayor sipping French Martinis poolside in Las Vegas while 20 people were shot and 8 killed on the streets of Baltimore last weekend.

But over and above it all is Edward Snowden. And this global game of Where’s Waldo is basically what the coverage of the NSA leaks story has come to. So we made this graphic for you. Click on it for the very large size and see if you can find Fast Eddie!

As usual, the Baltimore Chapter of Drinking Liberally will meet tonight at Liam Flynn’s Ale House to discuss Snowden and everything else in and outside the news. Meetings are free to attend and open to liberals of all stripes.

It’s also worth noting that DL is looking for a new home. The ideal bar will be able to host a group of 12-20 twice a month. It should be quiet enough to chat but lively enough to mingle. It should be central and not too difficult to park. It should have some food options and affordable beer, preferably in pitchers. Our vote is for Mick O’Shea’s. If you’ve got any suggestions for good Baltimore Bars for big groups, feel free to post them in the comments.

The Chop Buys a Nest

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We told you yesterday how we’ve finally and completely given in to Adulthood and joined a health club. The thing about adulthood though is that once you give in and accept it you find yourself becoming really excited about things that used to seem mundane. Like thermostats.

So at the risk of sounding just like our dad, we’re going to come out and say that we’re really excited about our new thermostat here at the Chophouse. We ordered a Nest last week and we already love it right out of the box.

Despite the fact that the Chophouse was newly renovated when we moved 3 years ago, our old thermostat looked like a bit of cutting edge technology from 1983. It sort of reminded us of a cheap digital sports watch; it had 45 functions but only 3 buttons, and we were left to guess at which button to push and how (push it? push and hold? push twice?) to make the temperature move. On top of that it ran on batteries, so if we went to sea for months on end and the AAA batteries ran out, the furnace stopped working entirely. Not an ideal setup.

So it was with sheer glee that we ripped it right off the wall and threw it into the trash. Not only is the nest a giant leap forward technologically, as you can see it also looks pretty sharp in the Chophouse.

(It should be noted too that most of the time the screen is blacked out. It only shows the display if you’re standing in front of it.)

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Worrying about batteries dying and the house freezing over is a thing of the past now. In fact, we’re done worrying about anything thermostat related because we can now see and control our furnace from halfway around the world with our iPhone. The Nest works with our home wifi network, meaning it can be controlled and adjusted from any smartphone, tablet or computer, including the one you’ve got under the blankets with you on a cold February night.

But perhaps one of the nicest things about Nest is that it’s really only as high tech as you want it to be. Sure, has a motion sensor and it can be controlled remotely and it knows the weather forecast for its location and can learn your habits and adjust itself and can email you energy use reports… but it doesn’t have to. Even without a wifi network at home it’s still a gorgeously designed and full functional thermostat that’s easier to read and adjust than the one on your wall. Perfect for multi-generational homes, mom can set patterns and view reports on her tablet, while grandpa sneaks up to it and just turns the dial manually when he gets cold.

The Nest was almost as easy to install as it is to use. We opted to snap it on with the fairly large trim plate and steel bracket which were included, and the whole thing only took about 30 minutes. In fact, it was so easy we may take it apart again and do the spackling and painting required to put it right on the wall. Old Baltimore rowhouses though… sometimes it’s best to let sleeping walls lie.

We’re thrilled with our Nest and we think it’s the kind of small investment that can really boost a house’s overall value and resale appeal, and of course its present livability. Our only regret is that without central air conditioning at the Chophouse, we’ll have to wait until October to really start playing around with it.

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We’d like to thank Nest for providing our review unit at wholesale cost.

The Chop Joins a Gym

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Yes Baltimore, it’s true. We can hardly believe it either. This weekend your Chop submitted to one of the final and most overt symptoms of adulthood. On top of paying a mortgage and actively pursuing an 800 credit score and doing yard work and playing golf we’ve gone and joined a gym. It’s like we don’t even know who the Chop is anymore.

There is still a big part of our psyche that’s rooted in punk rock, and rejects the notion of working out, and especially working out in a health club as something that’s strictly for jocks and yuppies. Of course we realize that that’s nothing more than dumb high-school tribalism, but it’s still the notion we’re stuck with. At least until today when we actually start going to the gym and will be forced to realize that it’s not all investment bankers and ex- collegiate lacrosse bros but just so many regular people.

And that’s what we are too. Regular people. As much as we’d like to think so we’re not too punk for anything, including the gym. We came to the realization a while back that being over 30, we’re kind of at a crossroads. Youthful metabolism and incidental exercise just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

The Chop’s not so bad looking, and we can still fit easily into slim cut 36w jeans but we’re also not the 190 lbs we were 10 years ago. At this point in life we can either continue to gain weight slowly and rely on a decent wardrobe and a sailors’ tan to make up the difference, or we can put in a little fuckin’ work and actually get better looking with age. It really doesn’t take that much time and effort to drop a little fat, build a little more muscle and get to be better looking and healthier. The one option that’s not open to us is staying in just the exact same shape we’re in now. That’s simply not possible.

So today is our first day as a member at Meadow Mill Athletic Club. We went in this weekend and took advantage of their 90 days for $99 Summer Special and it’s all pretty weird to us right about now. Honestly we feel, and probably look, quite a bit like this clip from What About Bob. We went in and signed up without even bringing workout clothes. Baby steps. Baby steps to the gym. Baby steps to the locker room. Baby steps to the bulletin board with the class signups. Baby steps to the free weights.

We’ll get the hang of it all soon. Hell, we might even swing by the pool at Druid Hill Park for an hour and try to get an actual tan while we’re at it. A tan! And we’ve even gone ahead and clicked over to Amazon and bought ourselves a squash racquet. Squash! That’s about as un-punk as it gets and you know what? We’re okay with that.

Shows and Events Around Baltimore This Weekend

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We don’t usually do Weekend Watch or Shortlist type posts here at the Baltimore Chop. We like to leave that kind of thing up to trained professionals like the City Paper and highly skilled amateurs like Showspace, preferring instead to pick favorites and write about what we’re actually doing.

This weekend though, that’s tough. There’s a lot going on and Baltimore being Baltimore, there are always surprises. So if you’re looking for the Chop around town this weekend here’s the list of stuff that caught our attention and which we may or may not actually turn up for. Mostly may.

FRIDAY

Outdoor movies are a Summer staple here in Charm City, and this year Union Craft Brewing has got in on the act. Every Friday in June they’ve been showing outdoor movies at their brewery in Woodberry and serving up delicious beers. This series is especially nice to have around since all of the other outdoor movie screenings around town don’t begin until July, when the Summer is already 1/3 over. Tonight’s selection is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and folks who show up early can pop around to the brand new Union Graze Farmers’ Market.

City Paper is hosting its first ever Fashionable Art Show to celebrate the paper’s inaugural fashion issue. Taking Place at 302 W Fayette from 6-10 pm, the event is part art show, part fashion show, part gigantic happy hour. With a $10 admission and an open bar, it is absolutely impossible to go wrong here.

Speaking of the paper, they wrote recently about new-ish spot Club K on Maryland Avenue and the spate of Japanese bands that Michael Young has been booking in there. Tonight brings Japan’s Tacobonds and Groundcover, along with locals Adam Lempel and the Heartbeats as well as Sexgender, Echo Hey Hello, Natural Velvet and Jeff Carey.

The Sidebar is hosting a classic Sidebar Summer show headlined by local thrashy-rock dudes Radical Discharge and featuring our pick for Band of the Summer Hard Dads with Asylum and Merge Records’ Barren Girls.

Finally Golden West is hosting a benefit show for the Baltimore Animal Rights Federation and Humane League of Maryland featuring Baltimore pro-animal rights, pro-vegan, pro-queer, pro-literature, pro-movement anarcho-punkers Friendbeast, Enemy Insect and post-hardcore ragers Night Moves.

SATURDAY

Charm City Craft Mafia brings its annual Pile of Craft to the 2640 Space. it gets bigger and better every year and is always worth a look-see.

Tomorrow night Frazier’s on the Avenue hosts one of its all too infrequent punk rock shows bringing in Dope Body, Whoarfrost, Clock, and Mount Royal.

SUNDAY

You can pretty much park your ass at the Ottobar all day Sunday. They’ll be projecting the O’s game on the big screen at 1:05, along with crabs and beer.

Sunday evening brings the long-awaited Double Dagger non-reunion to the Ottobar when Roomrunner, Pure Junk and Peals Share the stage with Small Sur. We guess there’s going to be a lot less stage diving than the last time these guys were all in the bar on the same night. There will also be a screening of the documentaryIf We Shout Loud Enough about the last days of Double Dagger before the show.

Upstairs at night and running concurrently is a free show featuring Burger Records’ Juniper Rising and Adam Lempel and the Heartbeats with Dj’s Nolen Strals and Jess Morgan.

For those seeking to keep it a little more low-key, there’s a screening of the Goonies at Golden West at 9 pm along with late-night happy hour specials.

Finally, we usually puke all over reunions on this blog but not even a jaded old fuck like the Chop can poo-poo the fact that Man or Astro-Man is back together and playing shows. They’ll be at the Black Cat on the main stage tonight and if it weren’t for Sunday funday at the Ottobar we’d be sorely tempted to get a zipcar and drive down there.

TV Party Tonight

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Around the Chophouse we don’t typically do a lot of TV watching. At least, not a lot of prime-time TV watching. We like to watch the O’s of course, and more than a healthy dose of MSNBC although that’s mostly just background noise. Other than that we like a little Comedy Central before bed but that’s about it.

So you wouldn’t figure us as the type who’s on the leading edge of technology, but at the same time we can see the writing on the wall and we’re so far behind technologically that it just makes more sense to take a great leap forward. When we moved into this house in September of ’09, we were lugging around a 50 pound hand-me-down TV set with an analog antenna and a built-in VCR, both of which were already obsolete.

At this point we’ve got 3 flatscreen HDTV’s set up in the house, but we never did make a successful transition off of VHS. Our considerable collection of videotapes ended up in a landfill somewhere, but we only ended up with 1 modest DVD player, and never even thought about blu-ray. Then Blockbuster went belly up, and the country’s single convenient source of cheap used DVD’s disappeared when we’d only built our collection to a couple dozen.

The home screen for Apple TV is clean and simple.

After a little more than a year as a Netflix subscriber it occurred to us that we’d be the perfect candidate for a so-called set-top box or buddy box. We have the feeling that pretty soon DVD’s and even blu-ray discs are going the way of VHS. The Cloud is already here, and it’s only a matter of time before people decide they want to quit paying $20 apiece to pile up more plastic crap in their living rooms.

So we’re in the cloud, but the big question now is which cloud? There’s a large selection of devices out there, but unfortunately they are all in their infancy and have a long way to come. Also no clear market leader has emerged the way the iPod took over the ‘mp3’ player market. So we decided we’d get two different ones and pair them against each other head to head. The winner might get bought again. The loser might go on Craigslist (or at least get moved into the office where it’ll be seldom used). It’s too early to report full results, but here are some of the early notes.

We’ve had very mixed experiences with Apple products in the past, loving our iPhone and being incredibly sore about some other devices. We’re already developing a love/hate relationship with our Apple TV. We bought it primarily to stream Netflix, and it does that really well. Most people’s biggest complaint about Apple TV is that the minimalist remote makes typing a chore, pecking out one letter at a time on the screen. That hasn’t been an issue for us since we’ve installed the Remote app on our iPhone. It’s allowed us to ditch the Apple TV’s remote entirely, controlling the box from our phone with a pop up screen keyboard and all.

Unfortunately, it also serves as a constant reminder that Apple products don’t always work as well as they boast. Remote can’t quite sync up with our iTunes library, and the Apple TV itself is hit or miss about being able to identify and play over home sharing. One thing it does do though is pick up the Photo Stream from our phone, which our laptop has never been able to do. Home sharing between the phone and (Windows) computer is also a no-go for us, and after hours and hours of searching for solutions online we’re resigned to the fact that we’re probably going to have to go to the Apple Store and beg a ‘genius’ for help with all our hardware in tow.

We also can’t access Airplay, as it’s only available on iPhone 4s and above. It would be nice to be able to transmit Safari from our phone to the TV, but we’re going to have to wait until we’re eligible for an upgrade to try that.

Apple TV provides direct access to the iTunes Store for movies, with credit card information on file shopping is simple and buying is a snap. That’s no mistake. The Apple TV isn’t so much a platform for you to enjoy yourself as it is a platform to sell you content, mostly at extremely inflated prices. We’re not sure we want to start buying many movies from Apple, since their digital coding forces us to be more and more beholden to Apple with each purchase.

Wanna buy movies? Buy! Buy! Buy!

The only reliable source of free content from Apple is podcasts, although even as podcasts come into their own they are very much audio-centric and not the sort of thing that plays well on television. Aside from a few newsy programs like Rachel Maddow, there’s not much there video-wise.

We like that there are native apps for MLB, NHL and NBA, although these are of course a separate subscription fee for each. Highlights and standings are available for free though, which is a handy feature.

The remaining native apps that work well are Hulu Plus, Youtube and Vimeo, although without a Hulu Plus subscription it doesn’t work at all. We’ll probably end up with one, because at $8 a month it basically pays for itself after you watch 1-2 movies. Beyond that though, there’s nothing. There’s no app store for Apple TV, and no one seems to be developing additional apps for it.

At $99, a love/hate relationship was what we expected, and it’s pretty much what we got. It’s also what we’re getting so far from Google TV, but that’s a story that’s going to have to wait for the next post.