The Top 5 Baltimore Fashion Mistakes

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Earlier this month Baltimore found itself in the dubious third position in Travel and Leisure Magazine’s worst dressed people list. We were prepared to defend our city’s honor and attack T and L for publishing yet another lazy internet listicle, but then we thought- you know what? They’re right. The list was the result of a reader survey, so it was essentially some horribly, terribly dressed tourists passing judgements on some badly dressed locals.

This is how the rest of the country sees us. (photo via eastcoastbias.com)

Besides, they didn’t say anything that wasn’t actually true:

According to eight-year resident Erika Poniske, [Baltimore] locals dress poorly for a host of reasons, some of which can be attributed to city subcultures. Baltimore hipsters, she says, bypass the tried-and-true thrift store, opting to dumpster dive for their clothing instead. And if you spend enough time in the quirky neighborhood of Hampden, you might just run into a woman wearing her hair in a real-deal ’50s beehive.

Poniske believes it’s the city’s die-hard commitment to all things casual that makes it most deserving of its ranking. “If you’re going to take time to dress up in Baltimore, you better be on your way to somewhere specific. Otherwise you’re going to stand out, and you’re going to feel awkward.”

This blog has been at the forefront of Baltimore style since its inception, but apparently you people haven’t taken our advice to heart. So instead of defending our fair city and talking more about all the things we’re doing right, we thought we’d take this opportunity to let you all know exactly what you’re doing wrong…

5/ Wearing clothes with stains, creases and holes. This is the equivalent of picking up food out of the garbage, sniffing at it and saying “It’s still good!” Instead of getting rid of stained or torn clothing, or at least relegating it to around-the-house or workwear, Baltimoreans habitually pretend that no one else notices the giant ketchup stain on their favorite shirt. We’re also convinced that none of you own an ironing board.

4/ Being 2 years behind fashion. Sure, not every city can be New York, Paris or Milan, but they have a new invention called the internet, and any asshole art schooler with a digital camera can be a street fashion blogger. We love that Baltimore is a city dedicated to looking good on a budget, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. The right way: incorporate subtle runway type accents into your wardrobe. The wrong way: wait for designers’ down-market lines and black label shit to trickle down to TJ Maxx.

3/ Not knowing what season it is. We don’t mean this in a ‘rules of fashion’ sense, we mean it in a calendar and weather report sense. Maryland is lucky enough to have four seasons, but since none of those seasons are particularly extreme and weather can change within a season, people make bad seasonal fashion choices all year round. In Baltimore it’s not uncommon to see a group of women out together, one wearing ugg boots, one wearing heels and another wearing flip flops.

2/ Our hipsters are hipper than your hipsters. People throw around the word hipster all the time now, but Travel and Leisure seems to have found someone who actually knows from hipsters. Her criticism of dumpster diving hipsters isn’t far off. While hipsters in places like Brooklyn and Portland frequent curated vintage boutiques and have lists of favorite Etsy sellers, Baltimore hipsters will wear anything they can get for free. Even if it comes out of an eviction pile.

1/ Purple Camo Pants. It’s bad enough that half the city is wearing Ravens jerseys to work on Fridays and then again all day Sunday, but just when you thought that the fashion abortion of camouflage cargo pants couldn’t get any worse, they’ve gone purple. If you bought your pants at a roadside stand in Overlea or Halethorpe, you’ve absolutely done your part to make us one of the worst dressed cities in the nation. Thanks, football people.

Just For the Lulz : Our Bi-Weekly Political Roundup

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There are two things that will set the 2012 presidential election apart from all other previous elections. The first and more important of these is that in the wake of Citizens United this is absolutely the year of the super pac, and we’re seeing campaigns financed in ways that were never possible before.

The second, and the one we’re going to talk a bit about today is that campaigns know how to talk faster than they ever have before.

Not long ago, there was a daily news cycle. Campaigns would generally do one thing a day, and get it done by 6 pm and that would be the TV news lead that night and the newspaper headline the next morning. More recently, we’ve moved into the “24-hour news cycle” in which campaigns try to ‘break news’ throughout the day and circulate talking points from very early morning until late evening, when they add it all up to see who ‘won the day.’

Now, we’re moving even faster than that.

Four years ago, the Obama campaign made history by using the internet to break news, communicate its message, and organize supporters in ways that had never been thought of before. It was incredibly effective and was the envy of political operatives everywhere. And this year it’s just not good enough.

So what if Barack Obama’s on Twitter in 2012? Everybody’s on Twitter, even boring old square Mitt Romney. And he’s actually hiring people who know about the internet, not just pulling the John McCain move of asking his daughter to help him set up a Hotmail account. Both campaigns have incredibly sophisticated online operations. How sophisticated? Obama registered romneyeconomics.com and had it redirect to his own site, presumably just for the lulz. But then this is the same Obama who’s openly launched a full scale cyber war against Iran, so lulz abound.

What it comes down to is that both of these campaigns can now talk so fast that they often don’t know what they’re saying. This post from Rachel Maddow’s blog is a good snapshot of where the campaigns stand at this point in time. Mitt Romney says we should fire a bunch of cops and teachers and firefighters. Now, it would be a throwaway ‘gaffe’ if Romney had a policy position in place that he could point to, but he doesn’t. Old Mittens shot his mouth off, and then the whole national campaign had to get together in the next five minutes and draft a cohesive policy on distributing federal money to states and localities to fund public employees’ positions and prevent layoffs.

Of course they couldn’t do it, and that’s why you’ve got one ‘surrogate’ saying one thing and another ‘surrogate’ saying something else and the candidate himself saying things like “I don’t know what I said, but I stand by it, whatever it was.”

If you’ve tuned out of the presidential race at this point… we can’t blame you. It’s going to take until convention and debates time before both campaigns are really prepared to talk much about substantive policy issues. If you’re not completely tuned out yet, Drinking Liberally is tonight, and you can come drink whiskey and talk politics until you make as little sense as a real live presidential candidate.

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The Baltimore Chapter of Drinking Liberally meets at Liam Flynn’s Ale House tonight at 7 pm. Look for the red, white and blue bottle on the table. 22 W. North Ave in Station North.

Friend Collector, Lady Piss @ Ottobar Tonight

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And now we come to the Blogger’s Paradox. The Blogger’s Paradox holds that the more a band does, sometimes the less there is to write about them. As a music fan, we love it when our favorite bands play all the time. Getting to see a band you love twice a month is great. Who could complain about that?

As a blogger though, it’s hard to find a new thing to say about bands that play all the time. With touring bands, they’ve usually done a whole lot since the last time they came around, and you can talk a bit about their newest record, their European tour, etc etc. When a band plays all the time, sometimes the best you can say is ‘last week’s show raged, tonight’s probably will too.’

Friend Collector raged the last time we wrote about them, and they’ll probably rage tonight and next week too. They raged so hard we named a cocktail after them. What else is there to say?

There are four other bands on the bill tonight. Lady Piss, Whores, Hex Machine, and Power-Take-Off. The truth is that we don’t really know what the hell to say about any of them. They all occupy that ill-defined space of heavy music somewhere between post-hardcore and metal proper that we really like to see live. If you like to see it live too, then get your ass there tonight.

One more thing to mention about this show: It begins at the very reasonable hour of 8pm and happens to coincide with Twofer Tuesday at the upstairs bar, so the potential for epic ragery is at an all time high.

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Ottobar is at 2549 N. Howard St in Charles Village/Remington. All ages, $8.

25 Free Downloadable Punk Rock Ringtones

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So here’s what happened: 2 years ago Blackberry was still a viable company and hadn’t decided to roll itself off a cliff yet. It had just released the Torch, and we bought one, and never really liked it much.

Once our 2 year contract was up we practically ran to Best Buy, where we were able to trade our POS Blackberry for a shiny new iPhone 4. Incidentally, Best Buy is a great place to buy a phone- far better than going to your carrier’s store. They gave us a $55 giftcard for our old phone, and let us put our new $49 iPhone 4 on the same card, so we walked out with a free phone and a $2 giftcard after tax, and all it cost us was a crummy old Blackberry.

Once we got it home and began the process of setting it up, we realized we were going to need a new ringtone.phones

But here’s the thing… We weren’t keen on getting nickel and dimed to death in the app store when we’ve already got hundreds of suitable songs in our iTunes. We decided to make our own ringtone, goddamn it.

So we Googled it and learned how to do it and now it’s done. But what we found out was that the whole process is an oddly fascinating way to waste time. It reminded us very much of the care and attention it used to take to make mix tapes back in the 80’s and 90’s. Everything from selecting the right song to picking the start/stop times to making sure it loops together requires you to interact with your music and pay attention to detail in a way you never would otherwise.

So we went through iTunes alphabetically and made way more than we could use, and now we figure we’ll give them away on the blog. The songs below aren’t full songs, they’re clips ranging from 10 to 40 seconds designed to loop into themselves. You can play each one by clicking it, and download the ones you want by right clicking and selecting ‘save link as.’ The first batch is 25. If anyone gives a shit, maybe we’ll make more in the future.

Important: WordPress doesn’t allow .m4r (ringtone) files to be uploaded, so we had to change all of these back to mp3 to upload them here. If you want to download any of these, you need to change the file extension back to .m4r after you save them according to these instructions. Once you’ve done that, simply drag them into the Tones section in iTunes and sync your phone.

Please let us know in the comments if we’ve screwed anything up or if these are somehow not working. Also please let us know if you want the rest of the alphabet or if this was just a tremendous waste of time. Enjoy.

The Couch Chronicles, Volume XI

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It’s been an eventful morning here at the Chophouse. As you already know if you’vebeen following along, we’ve spent the last two months or so designing a new living room from the ground up. We’ve been putting it all together piece by piece, and this morning we finally added our pièce de résistance… our new sofa from Pad.

First: a reminder of what we started with. Here’s our before picture…

And now, the after…





But this morning isn’t just the story of getting a couch. It’s the story of not getting an ottoman.

You see, we also ordered a Charlton ottoman to go with our Charlton sofa. And they brought us our ottoman. And when they unwrapped it and set it on the floor it was huge. Not just big, but tremendous. Believe us when we tell you, it was large.

Our ottoman was the same size as one of the sofa cushions, which is to say that it was fully half the size of the couch. It was bigger than the television and more than half the size of the rug. Any way you look at it, it was entirely too large for our modest rowhouse.

And it was our fault. We didn’t measure precisely. We didn’t lay everything out adequately. We glossed over the measurements on the tear sheet Pad provided us. We screwed up, plain and simple.

But Su Casa saved the day. As we mentioned before, even though this is a semi-custom upholstered piece they allow returns on the spot… no questions asked. As much as we hated to do it, we had to ask them to carry the ottoman back out to the truck. And it was no problem at all. Within an hour Su Casa had called us back to confirm our credit card info and process our refund, and just like that it was as if our huge screw up never even happened.

That saves us two huge problems. As huge as the ottoman itself, actually. It not only keeps us from paying for something we can’t really use, but also from having a gigantic ottoman that we’d have to figure out what to do with. We’ve got to take our hat of to Su Casa, and we really can’t thank them enough.

Most of the morning has been taken up with adjusting and arranging furniture, and surely there’s going to be plenty of rearranging in the weeks to come, but for now it’s finally time to put our feet up on our brand new sofa.

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This post is part of our entry in the Test it, Blog it, Win it contest. You can read the rest of the posts in this series and track the room’s full progress here.