The Chop Goes Car-Free

Posted on by

There are a couple of seldom-admitted paradoxes that we’ve been noticing more and more lately that we want to address today, and they have to do with bicycles and buses.

Most of the “bike people” we know and interact with are eager to evangelize bicycling as a lifestyle. They’re always quick to tout the health benefits, brag about not being stuck in traffic, and romanticize things like Ciclovia. Mention anything negative about cars and they’re quick to suggest that you buy a bike. Once you get them off their soapboxes though, and they start to speak frankly, they’ll let slip that drivers are rude and sometimes violent to cyclists, tires blow out far from home, riding through bad neighborhoods is scary, scrapes and bruises are far too common, you often arrive sweaty or rained-on, and bike planning leaves a lot to be desired. Who wouldn’t want to bike everywhere?

Baby you can drive my car... cause I'm done with it.

Similarly, public transit’s biggest advocates are also its biggest critics. Those who praise the virtues of leisurely reading on a bus commute or bypassing traffic on a train are also the first to scream bloody murder when a bus misses a stop or the MARC is delayed (which happens every single day).

With all this in mind, we’re starting to doubt our own sanity considering that this week we’ve decided to sell our perfectly good Chopmobile and buy a bicycle, but that is precisely what we’ve determined to do.

It’s not like we’re breaking new ground here. We’re certainly not the first person to live in Baltimore without a car. Hell, we’ve even spent two separate years carless before now, so we’ve got a pretty good idea of what it’s like to live without a car. The key difference now though is that where before our reasons for being carless were financial and circumstantial, this time we’re making an active lifestyle choice. We’re going to try being car-free as opposed to car-less.

The main challenge here is not dodging traffic coming down Saint Paul at rush hour… for us, it’s trying to ride a bicycle without becoming a “bike person.” We’ve spent the past weekend bike shopping, and some of these bike-shop people are even worse than car salesmen.

So we’re not going to become a bicycle commuter. There aren’t any critical mass events or Annapolis trail rides in our very near future. We might even buy another car in the next year or so. In the meantime though, we just want to get around a few miles’ radius of the inner city, and we want to do it on two wheels. Wish us luck.

Welcome to the Working Week

Posted on by

There’s going to be some changes here at the Baltimore Chop. One of the great things about blogs as opposed to some more traditional forms of media is that evolution comes much more naturally. Any blog that remains static for too long will inevitably become stale.

Seeing that we’re coming up on our second anniversary of blogging, and now that we’re a fancy-schmancy award-winning website, it’s time we started acting like one a little more. Soon enough, we’re going to go ahead and spend the $15 bucks or whatever to get a real grown-up url, and ditch the good old freebie theme in favor of something that will work better with what we’re doing here. There are also a few more changes we’d like to roll out in due time.

Perhaps the biggest change though, and the one that starts today is that this will no longer be a seven day a week blog. Our blog stats and our own observations have made one thing crystal clear, namely that no one reads blogs on the weekend. In the beginning, it made sense to post every day, but now that we’re approaching 400 posts there’s really no need to keep piling up posts every day. Some of our best stuff gets buried on the weekend, and we’d like to have a little more freedom to not be brainstorming and writing every single day. So effective immediately, the new posting schedule is five days a week.

Have a good weekend, Choppers. We’ll see you on Monday.

Avoiding the Freshman Sydrome

Posted on by

Online Viagra Cialis Levitra From Canada. Buy Generic Or BRAND Drugs For Full Customer Satisfaction. No Prescription With Guaranteed Lowest Prices. The Largest Canadian Mail Order Pharmacy. Any Website Visitor Wants To Purchase Reliable Inside The Drugstore On The Phone Here basics Simply. With Great Discount. Also Get Free Samples Of symbicort.
First things first… The first thing is that we’re happy to announce that this blog was recognized yesterday by the City Paper in their annual Best of Baltimore issue as being Baltimore’s Best Local Blog. The BoB award carries a lot of weight in this town, and most of your finer local establishments display one on their walls from some year or another, so we’re excited to have one of our own to put in the office. We’re looking forward to spending long hours staring at it while we’re lazy and distracted and saying to ourselves “What the fuck are we going to write about today?” which is how blogs are made.

We also want to thank the CP staff for paying enough attention to remember that we are a blog. If we were handing out advice to a beginning blogger, it would not be “don’t write anything at all for 3 months” which is exactly what we’ve done up until yesterday. It means that much more to us for having been offline these 90 days.

A visual approximation of the Chop being the best.

So like we said, we get a little award suitable for framing. But the real prize when you win one of these is that you score an invite to the annual Best of Baltimore party, and get to hobnob and schmooze and glad-hand with the other winners, and of course, be privy to an open bar.

So we went there yesterday, and we did that. We even managed to get a date for the event. And without saying too much about it, we didn’t look at it as one of these “Oh I just need somebody to go with so let’s just go and hang out or whatever” dates. It was more like one of these “She seems pretty awesome and I really want this to go well and I’m kind of nervous about it and I still sort of can’t believe she said yes.” kind of dates. The best kind.

Which brings us to the main idea of this post. For a big date, or any type of big event whether it’s a job interview, a holiday, a wedding or what have you, the temptation is always there to go shopping beforehand and find something new to wear. It’s a temptation we usually resist, and we recommend the rest of you do the same.

Think about the beginning of high school. The first day of ninth grade is a big fucking deal for most kids. You’re out of middle school, and thrown in with a lot of older kids. You may be meeting kids from other middle schools, taking new classes, dating for real for the first time, and you’re trying you’re level best just to fit in, let alone cut a great figure down the hallways.

Maybe it’s different for girls, but for most of us boys your mom dragged you to the mall to hit the back to school sales and made you try on jeans and shirts for hours on end, wouldn’t let you get any of the things that you really wanted, or anything that wasn’t on sale, or anything that couldn’t double as church clothes- in short, anything good. So the first day of school rolls around and now that the clothes are bought you actually have to wear them, and in addition to all the hassles and stresses and pressures of starting high school, you’re constantly thinking “Do these jeans look like Dad jeans? Do these look like floppy clown shoes? Does this shirt make me look like a doofus?” And you wish you’d never gone shopping at all.

We’ve got it better as adults. Most of us have a much improved sense of style and a better sense of self than we did at 14, and we’re free to buy and wear what we will without any help from Mom. All the same, the Freshman Syndrome still persists.

Sure, those pants look great, but do they look great on you? That sweater is nice enough to be an investment piece, but will it itch your neck until you wash it a few times? New shoes are great to have, but they’re even better after you’ve broken them in and they’re not stiff and unforgiving. At the end of the day, looking good is mostly about confidence, and it’s hard to be very confident in something you’ve seen only once in a store mirror. The clothes that really inspire confidence are the ones that we know fit the best; that we’ve seen in our own mirrors, that we’ve been photographed in, that have generated plenty of compliments in the past. Better than new clothes are your favorite clothes.

Having a closet full of clothes that we can count on is one of the best things about being a bona fide adult. In our case, we’re always prepared for anything from a wedding to a funeral to a formal event, or even a date… no trip to the mall required.

Postcard from South Africa

Posted on by

We’ve finally made a safe return from our recent trip across the Middle East, and boy, are we glad to be home. No more sand, no more heat, no more staying up all night, no more Ramadan, no more baksheesh… We’re happy to be back to the life we want to live, going to shows, sleeping until noon, blogging and tweeting, and running amok right here in Baltimore.

This trip took us to Aqaba Jordan, Jeddah Saudi Arabia, Karachi Pakistan, Dammam Saudi Arabia, Shuwaikh Kuwait, Shuaiba Kuwait, Umm Qasr Iraq, Dubai UAE, Manama Bahrain, Karachi again, and (oddly) Port Elizabeth South Africa.

Rather than try to sum up all of that travel in one blog post, we’re just going to give you the barest little impression of the Streets of South Africa, which is kind of like Oakland, but even blacker.

Port Elizabeth’s old colonial city hall is still a functioning municipal building.

The colonial era Library, across the plaza from city hall and complete with a statue of Queen Victoria bustles with uniformed school children.

Virtually every flat surface in Port Elizabeth is completely covered in adverts for quack abortion services. Penis enlargement is also offered while you wait.

South African medicine is obviously much more highly evolved than our own. Their doctors can get you a promotion, help you win the lottery, recover stolen property, bring back lost lovers, and cure Aids, all for 50 Rand.($6.50)

The Chop Goes to the Middle East… Again

Posted on by

It’s the last week of June.

Do you know what that means?

It means we’re going to do the same exact thing we did in the last week of June last year…

which was to go to the desert for several months.

The Saudis are known for their playful sense of humor, flirtatious women and joie de vivre... right?

We’ve got bills, you know?

Grown folks’ problems.

And blogging doesn’t pay those bills. Doesn’t solve those grown folks’ problems.

So we’re gonna put the blog on hiatus until October.

We’re gonna go over to the desert and sweat our ass off and try not to get it shot off.

Wish us luck.

See you when we get back.