A Side By Side Comparison of Baltimore Roofers

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Most of you may remember that there was a torrential rain about two weeks ago. It rained hard for 30 hours straight. It was the sort of Baltimore downpour where Thames Street threatens to flood, gutters back up with Utz bags and hair weaves, and broken umbrellas are forsaken all over city streets.

The Chop was dismayed during this rain when a teeny-tiny spot on our bedroom ceiling increased in size several times over. It was clear that water was coming in somehow. Not much of it, but better to stay on top of these things early. We were going to have to call a roofer.

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Now, we’re still relatively new at this home-ownership business. We haven’t got a lot of experience in hiring contractors, so we thought we’d seek out the best we could find. In their best of 2010 issue, Baltimore Magazine printed a ‘throwdown’ among two area roofing contractors, and declared Fick Brothers the best roofer in the city.

So we called Fick Brothers. The lady who answered the phone (a secretary? a receptionist? Who else would answer a phone?) wouldn’t or couldn’t take our appointment for an estimate. She insisted that so-and-so would call us right back, which she did… more than two hours later. By that time, we had already set up an appointment with another company.

The runner up in the Baltimore Magazine article was Brothers Services. They were at least capable of taking an appointment, but that’s about all they were good for.

Now, the Chophouse is a rowhouse of the type illustrated in the picture. There is a small bit of roofing over the bay windows on the second floor, then a parapet wall, then behind that begins the main roof. The stain on our ceiling is near the bedroom windows, and it’s clear that the leak is not in the main roof, but somewhere near the front.

On the appointed day, Brothers showed up two hours late. When someone did arrive, it was a kid who couldn’t have been more than 22, tops. The card he handed us said “assistant manager.” We were pretty dubious about this at first. Even if this kid was totally competent at actual roofing work, he was certainly not a professional estimator. When we call on a company that is so well regarded, we’re calling for someone with many years, or decades of experience.

The kid went up the ladder, and when he came down our suspicions were confirmed. He pointed out 3 areas where water could be coming in, and recommended tearing out and replacing the entire section of roofing above the windows. And this was at a minimum. Then he started in with the “Well, we have an in-house mason we could call for that wall and blah blah blah…” He couldn’t even give us a proper estimate, but had to “talk to his boss” and said he’d email it to us. We suspected he was trying to get us over a barrel, and when the estimate came in the next day it was $2184.

Thanks to social media, word of mouth travels a hell of a lot faster than it used to. We put word out that we were looking for an honest roofer, and by the end of the day a friend came through and recommended Horizon Roofing. He said that Ken (the boss) had come out to his rowhouse and assessed a problem, and ended up telling him how to fix it himself. That was all we needed to hear.

When Ken came out for an estimate, he wasn’t two hours late but actually two days early. We were running out the door just as he arrived, but he left a detailed estimate in the mailbox that highlighted all the same areas over the windows, but his repair recommendations came to a mere $395. With a free servicing if it should leak again within 30 days.

We know who we’re about to hire, and we’re sure we’ll be writing Ken a thank you note in the very near future.

E. Joseph & the Phantom Heart, Poly/Western @ Windup Space Tonight

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Back in January we had some pretty nice things to say about local trio Poly/Western. Now that it’s almost April, we’re gonna go ahead and double down on those statements.

At that time, we’d been vaguely aware of this band, but hadn’t had the chance to see them live yet. We expected them to be good, but we don’t mind saying that they were great. They reminded us right away of some crazy hybrid of the Twilight Singers, Sense Field, Tool and Big Black. While the rest of the country is just catching onto stuff like Beach House and Wye Oak, we’re here to tell you that Poly/Western is on the vanguard of local talent, and they’re what Baltimore needs to start paying close attention to right now.

E. Joseph and the Phantom Heart play the Windup Space tonight. 9 pm Doors.

Those are some pretty bold statements for a band that has yet to put out its first full-length. We believe they’re warranted though. At the January show we picked up a free copy of their 3-song Orange ep, and it’s been in heavy rotation at the Chophouse ever since. We’d definitely advise you to check out the Poly/Western Bandcamp Page, where you can download the Orange ep, as well as the 3 songs that make up the Down Home Blizzard Demos. Giving a spin to either one of these brief recordings will easily have you wanting to play it again by the time it’s over.

Sharing the stage tonight and equally deserving of your attention tonight is Baltimore’s own E. Joseph and the Phantom Heart. The Phantom Heart is no small pill for the listener to swallow. On the face of it, this band makes pop songs. These songs, however, are not to be taken at face value. The artist page on their label’s site throws around the term “power-pop” pretty liberally, but we don’t quite think this does E. Joseph justice. A listen to their 2008 album All The Medicine In The World… will certainly remind a listener of the best of the 80’s, Duran Duran, Simple Minds and the like, but it also begs the question “What would have happened if U2 and Sting hadn’t fucked it all up for everybody?”

This is definitely some sub-genre of pop. Not power-pop, but we call it that because no one ever got around to naming it properly. It went extinct before anyone could. Only the Cure made it out of the 80’s relatively intact playing something close to this sound. It’s as dead as doo-wop. Dead as Latin.

If they’d been around 30 years ago, E. Joseph and the Phantom Heart are the sort of band that would have signed a multi-record deal on a major, been all over Vh1, and fueled many a post-prom heavy petting session from sea to shining sea. After the complete and utter collapse of the music industry though, they find themselves a perfect fit on the homegrown and very modern Beechfields Label. It’s no stretch to say that this band is revitalizing and reinventing pop music the same way that the Beechfields is helping to reinvent the music industry, and we’d urge anyone reading this to come out to the Windup Space tonight and support them both.

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Windup Space is located at 12 W. North Avenue in Station North. Survival Society and Me & This Army also play. Ages 21+

Libation Lounge @ Gin Mill Tonight

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It’s finally Friday, Baltimore. It’s a Friday after a hell of a long week, too. Between the crazy weather and the even crazier Libyans and all the other stresses of grown up responsibility, you look like you could use a drink.

Not just any drink will do on a Friday though. A pint of Boh or a shot of Pikesville in your ginger ale is seldom enough to wash away the travails of a long week and make the clock slow down for the rest of the weekend. A Friday night calls for a proper cocktail.

A visual approximation of the Chop getting stewed with Post Prohibition.

You’d be hard-pressed tonight to find any bartender pouring better cocktails that Josh Sullivan down at the Gin Mill. Josh is the writer behind one of our favorite local blogs Post Prohibition, which is an outstanding one-stop resource for all aspects of quality cocktail consumption. Featuring everything from original recipes to bottle reviews to house made add-ons (like scratch grenadine and bitters), Post Prohibition is an ever-expanding resource for anyone with a serious interest in cocktail culture.

The Libation Lounge is an occasional series of events where Josh comes out from behind the blog with a custom drawn menu of seasonal cocktails. Some are classics, some are updated, and some are original creations, but all of them are well-made and worthy of a taste. You can take a peek at the Hendrick’s-heavy Spring menu here, and we dare you to have a look and not find something you’d want to try.

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The Gin Mill is at 2300 Boston Street in Canton. The Libation Lounge event begins at 7 pm and will go on until last call.

A Conditional Approval of Straw Hats

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Please understand: we are very wary about endorsing hats as a point of style. Very few people can pull them off in the modern era without affectation, and where you see a fedora or trilby anywhere in the media, you can bet one of America’s biggest douchebags is under it.

However, as Hunter S. Thompson shows us here, sometimes a man in a hat is a bad mother fucker.

An ideal example of form following function.

Thompson was a very bald man who spent a great amount of time chasing assholes around the desert. He knew a thing or two about keeping the sun off his head. In fact, everything Thompson wore was extremely functional; sunglasses to shade the eyes and hide bloodshots. Boots for pounding pavement or kicking the way out of a jam, lots of pockets for cigarettes and drugs and guns and whatnot… you get the idea.

So with the weather turning warm now and the sun shining longer and longer by the day, we’re in the market for a new straw hat. We’re thinking we might head down to Hippodrome Hatters and try on a homburg or a snap-brim for the Summer. This endorsement is not unconditional though. There are a few rules to keep in mind with hats to make sure they look natural and effortless, and not like this.

    1. Strictly Summer. We’re talking about natural fiber hats here. You wouldn’t wear shorts or sandals after baseball season, and the same goes for straw.

    2. Be sure it fits the rest of your outfit. It’ll look fine worn over a linen or seersucker shirt, but downright clownish worn with jeans and tennis shoes. A summer hat should complement an already cohesive style.

    3. Be over 30. Or at least damn near 30. This is just not a young man’s look. Youth has plenty of advantages, but the ability to pull off things like elbow patches, loafers, beards and hats is not one of them.

    4. Stay in the sun. No man should ever be wearing a hat indoors, and likewise they’re equally out of place after the sun sets. Straw is subject to the same rules as sunglasses. Anyone wearing them inside or at night or both is a douchebag.

Perhaps no other accessory is so fraught with the possibility for disaster. Wear it wrong once, and tagged photos could be following you around the internet forever. Wear it right though, and it’ll fit so naturally it would be hard to picture you without it.

Bombs Over Benghazi: Our Bi-Weekly Political Roundup

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When Barack Obama was elected by a wide margin, and subsequently handed a Nobel Peace Prize, it was all based on one simple idea: that he’s not George Bush. Candidate Obama, for all his lofty speeches was elected on an unspoken compact with the electorate. He promised us, without saying so, that whenever he was confronted with any decision at all he would stop and ask himself what would W do? and then do the exact opposite.

We’ve seen this pattern play out in virtually every news cycle since. When Old Man Cheney or his little shrew of a daughter comes on TV criticizing the president, you can bet he’s making popular decisions and doing a bang up job. When he does something like halt Guantanamo trials and let the place operate business-as-usual, the Democratic base gets mad because he’s fucking up the promise.

Baltimore Drinking Liberally meets the second and fourth Wednessday of each month.

We really hate to say this, because it’s not very nice or compassionate or idealistic, but we just don’t care about Libya. Khaddafi can stay, Gadafi can go, and if Sharif don’t like it he can rock the casbah. We can still hear the neo-con cries of “But he bombed his own people!” from 2003. Truth is that the Kurds were on the point of revolution at the time, and they could never truly be described as “Saddam’s people.” Likewise, when Libyan civilians organized into a full scale revolutionary force and joined with a sizable portion of defected military to start seizing cities, they ceased to be ‘civilians’ as we think of them.

Some will say that Khaddafi has lost his legitimacy. That sounds all well and good, but what’s behind it? Is any leader legitimate who was not fairly elected? But he’s still recognized as leader, and has been for 40 years, and a UN resolution doesn’t change that. Sure, he’s an asshole, but there are assholes in power all over the world. We should have learned by now that just as in physiology, if you blow up an asshole you end up leaving the colon hanging out… and you get shit everywhere. We don’t even really know who these rebels are- maybe it’s best not to hand them a whole country just yet. They came at the king, they best not miss.

Some of you may be of the opinion that scatalogical imagery and Wire references are a poor way to express opinions on world affairs. It should appall or amuse you then to learn that we’ve decided to join the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs. We’re not sure how or why, but they sent us a letter about joining, so we will. You may remember it was one of our New Year’s resolutions to get involved in some sort of organized activity, and hobnobbing with politicos and statesmen in the World Trade Center sounds like something we could get used to.

Of course, it probably won’t be as much fun as hobnobbing with a bunch of young urban lefty drunks, which we’re already doing on a regular basis in the Baltimore Chapter of Drinking Liberally, which meets tonight at the Laughing Pint at 7 pm.

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Laughing Pint is located at 3531 Gough St. in Highlandtown. DL meetings are free and open to all.