If you ever wanted to spend a nice, pleasant, relaxing day in Baltimore, tomorrow is it. For one thing, it’s Spring! The weather right now is glorious. It’s cool and warm all at once and everywhere there are trees and leaves and flowers and birds. For someone who’s seen...

If you don’t know Justin Sirois by now, you certainly should. Not least because he’s a friend of the blog and a Baker Artist Award winner. We’ve already told you about his novel Falcons on the Floor and were especially interested in his serial, app centric follow-up So Say...

We’ve been out of town a long time. So long that we’re still not quite up to speed. It’s going to take your old Chop at least one day for every month away from Charm City to get back on track. As we said just the other day, a sailor leaves, comes home and strives to pick up...

It’s been well over a year now since we decided drive our trusty old Chevy down to Crazy Ray’s and let them chop it up. So far it’s gone really well for us. We’ve got no complaints and certainly aren’t going to be car shopping any time soon. A year on a bike has...

The life of a sailor is a peculiar thing. It’s more like two lives, really. There’s life at sea, which is very regimented and routine and carries over from ship to ship. After you’ve gained enough sea time you start to realize how small the world actually is- seeing some of...

We’re not sure Why it took us so long to catch on to the whole official election night party thing. It’s a pretty sweet deal. They’re mostly meant as a thank-you to staff and volunteers, but they’re generally open to the public so really any ‘supporter’ can...

We think Obama’s going to win. That’s not really a shocker coming from a decidedly liberal blog in a decidedly liberal city. We think Obama will win in a walk and that’s always been our opinion, since even before the GOP primaries. There was never even a time when we were...

A very well-kept secret of political activism is that a little bit of it can go quite a long way. When you turn on the news you can’t help but hear a lot about big money donors and fancy fundraisers. The images you see are all of paid staffers busily manning campaign offices or dedicated...

For most people there are four seasons in the year. For the chronically single among us, especially those of us over 30, there are only two seasons: Dating Season and Couples’ Season. Today, the day after Halloween, is the official beginning of Couples’ Season. It’s the time...

Here at the Chophouse we like to cook. Whether it’s something as simple as putting together a good sandwich or as complicated as laying out a four course dinner for six, we do more high quality home cooking than the average bachelor. When the Fall rolls around, we really kick it into...

If you’ve been watching closely recently, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve changed things up a bit around here. We added an image of Wee Willie Keeler’s T-206 tobacco card to the header, and adopted it everywhere we are online… Twitter, Facebook, etc. But what...

Back in June certain corners of the Internet went into a minor frenzy for about a week when NPR published an article by one of its 20 year old interns about how she owns tens of thousands of songs and didn’t pay for any of them and wants instant access to everything ever recorded for...

Yes, Choppers, it is here once again. That magical time of year when for two weeks we generally pester the hell out of your for votes in an online contest so that our modest little blogging hobby can receive a tiny bit of validation from the media establishment. Voting officially begins today...

It’s been a while since we did the whole Bike Party thing. We tried to do it back in June and while we made it to the Block Party, we decided that 110° was just too damn hot for recreational riding. Then we thought about doing it again in July when there was a coordinated ride timed...

It is one of the great injustices in the music world that shitty bar bands who cover top 40 songs are usually some of the best paid bands out there. We don’t mean to say that getting up and playing Margaritaville and Rehab is ultra-lucrative and you can quit your day job doing it, but on...

If you’re standing on the street right now pissed off, smartphone in hand desperately Googling to figure out where the fuck your car is and how to get it back, relax. Take a deep breath. The Chop is here to help. If you were towed at rush hour, during a ballgame, or in connection with...

It was a slow weekend around the Chophouse. We spent most of it drinking boxed wine and watching hard-boiled movies from the 70′s like Midnight Express and Dog Day Afternoon. Hell, it was a slow weekend around Baltimore. Except for Sunday night, there wasn’t much doing. So we...

So no more Republican. That was fun while it lasted but we split amicably and mutually after just a few months, which leaves your Chop in a frustrating and absurd position: the state of Passive Dating. For most of our life we believed Passive Dating was a fiction- a made up thing that people...

On Tuesday in this space we publicly proclaimed our love of Fall. But there’s a whole lot more to love about Autumn than just stylish scarves- namely Baltimore Beer Week. Yes Choppers, the fourth annual Baltimore Beer Week begins today with the ceremonial tapping of the first firkin...

If there’s any silver lining at all to our beloved Baltimore Orioles being knocked out of the playoffs, it’s that we now have the evening free to go to the 11th installment of Ignite Baltimore tonight at MICA’s Brown Center. Small consolation, to be sure. While Ignite may not...

An unusual turn in our daily schedule had us heading uptown in the early afternoon yesterday, and it finally afforded us a chance to grab lunch at Land of Kush. It was pretty good, by the way. Good vegan food and big portions of it for reasonable prices. It was very much like the Yabba Pot...

Everybody loves the Fall. Being mid-October, we’re thick in the middle of pumpkin-flavored this and apple-spice that. Personally we can’t get enough of it. A million girls in Uggs and North Face could never trample our enthusiasm for Autumn, and we’re savoring every day of...

Update: Tonight’s bike ride is officially sold out. There’s only so much beer to go around. If you snoozed you lose-d. There will be another one soon. - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –...

As anyone who’s spent about one single hour on any social media site can tell you, there are a lot of fake holidays floating around lately. One can hardly wake up in the morning without being reminded that today is National Steak and a Blowjob Day or National Talk Like A Pirate Day....

Today’s the second Wednesday of the month, which means of course that it’s time once again for Drinking Liberally. Except that there is no Drinking Liberally this week because the VP debate is tomorrow night. Meetings will resume in two weeks though. They start at 7pm and run until...

Novels used to make their first appearances in serial format all the time. Many of the greats of American literature, from Mark Twain and Henry James to Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, originally published some of their best work in serial form, usually via monthly magazines. Fast forward to...

We’ve had our eyes trained toward the ballfield all season long at Oriole Park this year. In fact, we’ve focused so closely on the diamond that we missed the new Dempsey’s Brew Pub almost entirely. Oh, we knew it was there and all. It’s kind of hard to miss these days...

We were really looking kind of hard for something to say about tonight’s show. Off With Their Heads is coming to the Golden West. We don’t have too much to say about them because we’re not very familiar with them. They’re a punk band on Epitaph so it’s like...

If Christmas can be a month-long holiday every year, they why can’t Halloween, huh? Well, it can if you get into the Halloween spirit. There’s nothing stopping you from going on hayrides and carving up pumpkins and walking around spooky old graveyards all month long if you want to....

We kind of have mixed feelings about Godspeed You Black Emperor here at the Baltimore Chop. They’re a band that’s always had a lot of vision and integrity and has been unique every step of the way, defying comparison to other bands in an age where you are the sum of your...

Well, we did it. After years of daydreaming about it in a nebulous, faraway manner we’ve finally gone ahead and put down a deposit for Orioles season tickets. Yesterday was, of course, the deadline to drop deposits and still be eligible for ALCS and World Series series tickets, and that...

Last week over on the Baltimore Brew local architect Klaus Philipsen offered a defense of the Mechanic Theater and made the case for its historic preservation. This blog, however, remains unconvinced and today we say that that ugly, useless monstrosity should be torn down immediately. It is...

We said in this space recently that Baltimore’s premiere cultural festival, Artscape, was highly overrated. The whole experience is such that some years we skip over it entirely and don’t even show up for a single day. This weekend the coin flips, and the city is gearing up for its...

As we mentioned yesterday, the city of Superior, Wisconsin prides itself on the number of bars within its limits. One needn’t visit more than a few of them to realize that they’re all strikingly similar. They’ve all got the same cheap tile floors, the same low-grade wood bar...

When we left off blogging it was the Dog days of Summer and in the world of electoral politics Silly Season was in full swing. There was precious little to talk about of any significance. Now we seem to have the opposite problem. We’re heading down the home stretch with the debates right...

Our recent travels brought us to Duluth, Minnesota and the city just across the river, Superior, Wisconsin. What’s Duluth like? It’s nice enough. It’s a very pleasant place, if not the most thrilling city on earth. There’s a waterfront park which is popular among the...

And just like that we’re back. We’ve spent the last two months working up in Minnesota and Michigan. We were pretty busy that whole time, and didn’t get to carve out much time at all for recreation, but thanks to the magic of DirectTV we were at least able to keep up with the...

It’s too goddamn hot. We’re going to spend the rest of the Summer on the Great Lakes. Smell you later, Baltimore. We’ll be chilling in the Great White North for the next 60 days. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, maybe Canadia. Have fun with your scapefests and your...

When we bought the Chophouse a few years ago, we had a pretty good idea exactly what we were looking for. Living close to downtown was a must for us, but alas… a four story brownstone next door to the Engineers Club was a bit beyond our means. We could afford a pretty nice house in a...

First there was just the urban landscape. Here’s an old train station and here’s a little patch of grass and here’s a statue and a few old brownstones around. Then somebody got the idea to fill the landscape up with art. They called it “Artscape.” It was a pretty...

We don’t usually like to write about the same exact things week in and week out here at the Baltimore Chop. We like to mix it up a little, keep it fresh. But as we mentioned yesterday, bloggers is broke these days, so things like free movies are exceptionally good entertainment on our...

Update: Presumably because of the water main break and the extreme heat and the generally shitty state of affairs in Baltimore City this has been postponed until August 15. Not exactly a banner endosement for living and working downtown, but that’s a matter for another time. Hey...

Good news everyone! In a thousand years most of you pathetic jerkbags will be ancient wormfood. And do you know what happens to ancient wormfood? (Hint: it involves the Slurm Queen’s cloaca.) But that’s not really news, is it? You already knew you were boned. The good news is that...

Artscape is coming up this weekend. We might even bother to go to it. Don’t get us wrong: Artscape is a great and wonderful thing and our heart floweth over with civic pride and our city is truly lucky to have a premier arts event that generates tons of commerce and community and...

Every city has its own fun little games that the locals like to play. Buffalo has ‘Spot the Canadian.’ Boston has ‘Get wicked drunk and yell in the street all night until someone picks a fight.’ LA has Breast Implant Bingo, and in Baltimore we have the grandest game of...

It feels like we’ve been waiting for this since about the first day of April and it’s finally, finally arrived. Flicks From the Hill Kicks off on the side of the American Visionary Art Museum tonight, and we’ll be showing up early and picking out a prime viewing spot. If...

For those who don’t already know, Baltimore’s Urbanite Magazine is currently in the middle of its 2012 Healthy Food Challenge. The Project is an ongoing and multifaceted effort which includes a request for grant proposals, magazine articles, food policy themed events and...

As we mentioned yesterday, Baltimore is smack in the middle of a long and miserably hot Summer. Temperatures have often been in the triple digits lately, and a Baltimore Summer being what it is almost every other day has found us on our way to a house party, cook-out, DIY show, festival or...

It’s been hot in Baltimore lately. Real hot. Damn hot. Unbearably effing hot. Any heatwave with 100° plus temperatures is hard to endure, but many people in Maryland spent most of the last week without power, making the heatwave exponentially worse. We were without power for 3 days...

We’ve said before that Baltimore may be suffering Festival Fatigue. This weekend is evidence of that. There’s enough music being played live this weekend in Baltimore to easily last a full Summer if it were stretched out. According to our count, there are nearly 70 acts performing...

With the whole Derecho Debacle and the Fourth of July falling on a Wednesday, this week has turned into pretty much a nine day weekend for a lot of folks. Even if you weren’t lucky enough to get 9 days off, it’s a good bet you’re slacking pretty hard this week and taking at...

Today is the fourth of July. We’re pulling the blog into port and going ashore for a day off. Happy...

No power means no blog posts. Sorry kids. We’re sleeping on the balcony and living off of pizza and Chinese food and being bored and sweaty and miserable until the power comes on again. In a week or a month or...

Volume XVI. That’s sixteen in regular numbers. Our living room has come a long way over the course of the last few months. When we began this whole process, our front room was nothing more than a convenient place to park a bicycle. There was nowhere to sit, and even if you wanted to...

If there’s one thing every Baltimorean should own it’s a good calendar. Every time you turn around there’s a First Thursdays or a Final Fridays or a T-Shirt Tuesdays or some such thing. It’s quite a task to keep track of all of the various events that neighborhoodsy...

Terrible Feelings is a band. They’re from Sweden. This is what we imagine they look like when they play live. They sound like a cross between The Vicious and Siouxsie and the Banshees. They sound like this: There are more songs on their Soundcloud page. They’re playing with...

You already know that Su Casa sells furniture. You’re probably also aware that they’ve got you covered on everything from home decor to kitchen essentials to things for the kids’ bedrooms and play areas. They can even help you stock your bar. But what you probably...

We haven’t had oh so much to say recently about politics. Now that the Summer is in full swing political news has been mainly dominated by talk of fundraising and who’s raising how much and from whom, with only a little silliness thrown in for good measure. Today we have the...

One of the biggest benefits to cycling is the ability to notice things that would be missed passing by in a car. Whether it’s something as small as a makeshift snowball stand or as large as Sherwood Gardens, There’s an entire world waiting to be discovered outside your car. We...

Dave Tedder died suddenly last week. While I wasn’t especially close to Tedder, I’ve known him for more than half my life at this point. I’m sad to see him go. I always expected Tedder would be off for good someday, but not like this. He was a dude you naturally assumed...

If you’ve ever been inside a Su Casa location, you know it’s rarely the same store twice. They’re constantly bringing in new pieces, redesigning whole areas of their showrooms, and keeping things fresh and interesting. In that same spirit we’ve decided to...

Although we didn’t blog about it, we went to Punk Rock Karaoke at Liam Flynn’s Ale House the last time that outfit came through town in late March. Take it from the Chop: it was cool as shit. It’s rare that a crowded bar has the atmosphere and bonhomie of a house party full...

You know the Shamrock Inn. At least you should know the Shamrock Inn. It’s a Baltimore landmark of sorts. If you’re a true blue Baltimoron your dad probably knows the Shamrock Inn. You’ve likely driven past the Shamrock Inn a couple hundred times and said ‘Damn it, I...

We’ve spent a lot of time lately talking about designing our living room and all the new furniture we got from Su Casa, and especially our new sofa from Pad. We’ve been taking part in their Test it, Blog it, Win it contest, and while we’ve had a lot of fun decorating and...

As we mentioned last week, we finally ditched our crummy Blackberry and got our first iPhone. It was a no-brainer decision. We wanted the convenience of syncing the phone with iTunes and charging it on the two iPod speaker docks we already own. We also feel like Android hasn’t quite...

The last time we went overseas our house was robbed while we were away. It was immediately clear to us that the thieves who robbed us were not very sophisticated drinkers. They took a half empty bottle of Smirnoff and left a sealed, boxed bottle of Courvosier VSOP. They stole a bottle of...

We’ve always been of the opinion that Mount Vernon’s City Cafe is as consistently good as it is underrated. So when we heard that their chef Chad Gauss was opening a new restaurant in Hampden we had pretty high hopes. New restaurants open up all the time. Hell, new restaurants open...

Although we’ve only had our new sofa from Pad for a week today, we’ve been doing our level best to make up for lost sitting time. We figure we’ve probably got about three weeks’ worth of sitting in already, because we’ve been on the couch morning, noon and...

It’s Pride Festival weekend here in Baltimore. We’re not going to go into detail about the parade, festival, events, afterparties and everything else. You can check out baltimorepride.org if you want to know about that. What we are going to do is partake in one of...

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?...

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...

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...

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...

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...

See how lucky you are to live in a city like Baltimore? We have 3 good shows tonight. Some crummy cities don’t have any good shows. Go to the good shows and enjoy your Summer. Charm City Art Space. Golden...

It used to be hard to discover new music. Back when underground music was, um, underground- hell, back when you could use the term ‘underground music’ without sounding like someone’s dad it took a lot to discover music that wasn’t on the radio. It usually involved...

As human beings trying our best to live in polite society, we like to think that we’ve pretty much got it all figured out. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve barely got anything figured out. We may not want to admit it, but we’re pretty much just making...

As a lifelong Orioles fan and a big league bon vivant, we were incredibly excited to hear that former 3rd baseman and long-beloved legend politely tolerated player Melvin Mora would be opening his own restaurant here in Baltimore. We were sad ambivalent about seeing Mora leave the Orioles,...

It can be difficult to write about events like tonight’s screening of Food Stamped at the Pratt’s Central Library Branch. Typically, we write posts about things we like, explain why we like them, and why you, the internet-reading public should check them out for yourself. The...

As most of you already know, we’ve been participating in an ongoing contest in which we’re blogging about redesigning our living room. The whole thing is sponsored by local retailer Su Casa, who informed us that our couch has in fact been built and shipped, and is right this very...

This blog has been somewhat critical of food trucks in the past. In fact, as much as we like to cook and eat, we’re not keen on foodie culture as a whole. That’s still true. We still think that the food truck should belong to its working class provenance. Its modern reinvention by...

If there’s one thing that both locals and outsiders seem to enjoy immensely it’s pointing out that as a Mid-Atlantic city Baltimore has always been “A little bit Northern, a little bit Southern.” One of the strangest and most subtle ways that this phenomenon has...

As much as we like shopping for clothes and talking about style, we have to admit that like most men we kind of hate shopping for pants. Unlike shoes which fit consistently by size or shirts and jackets which are easy to pop on at the rack, trying on pants involves going into a dressing room...

Typically on this blog we only feature cocktail recipes we’ve come up with on our own. Today though we’re going to do something a little different, and feature a drink that was introduced to us by a friend this weekend. How could we not feature it? It’s so simple, and so...

As we’ve noted before on several occasions, Baltimore has long been a city dedicated to the value of thrift. Whether it’s shopping in thrift stores or picking things up off the street, most Baltimoreans will go to great lengths to save a couple of dollars. Baltimore is also a city...

Over the last two months, we’ve been participating in a contest detailing our experience designing our living room from the ground up. We purchased a good deal of our furniture from Su Casa, and can honestly say that we’ve enjoyed our experience shopping there more than we have...

Just in case you haven’t been following the Orioles closely this season, Brian Roberts has so far spent the entirety of it sitting in the dugout next to Buck Showalter, wearing his dumb beanie hat and chewing his stupid bubble gum and playing old hoss. Roberts finally reported for a...

Once upon a time, we mocked and derided Twitter mercilessly. Then we got a blog and joined Twitter and realized that OH! this is actually pretty awesome. Not only does it drive blog traffic, but it lets us know about almost everything way before everyone else- from a simple traffic jam to the...

Political news has been pretty slow lately, believe it or not. After King Romney was finally awarded the nomination which was his sacred and inalienable birthright everybody kind of took a nice little breather for a while. Luckily for those of us who enjoy politics-as-bloodsport that all ended...

Beyond the almighty blue crab, Baltimore cuisine often gets a bad rap- and it’s not entirely undeserved. Traditional dishes like shad roe and terrapin soup are little more than relics from 100 years ago, and the typical supermarket cart here is chock full of Esskay meats, Utz BBQ chips...

One of the problems with traditional supermarket shopping is that no matter how big the stores get, no matter how many products they offer, it’s too easy to fall into the supermarket rut. The typical shopper will buy staples like bread, milk, eggs and peanut butter, and beyond that stick...

One of the best aspects of shopping for furniture at Su Casa is the convenience of having several professional interior designers on staff who are available to consult on anything from finding a small accent piece to designing an entire house floor to ceiling. Aside from being the design face...

Happy Facebook Day everybody! This post is being published at 7:00 am, and odds are that even at this early hour you’re already completely sick of hearing about Facebook’s IPO and how they have a billion users and are worth a trillion dollars etc etc etc. We’ve certainly got...

Walking around and looking for a drink in downtown Baltimore can make you feel a little like Goldilocks. The Inner Harbor bars are too touristy and overpriced. The non-touristy places, like Midway Bar are too sketchy (and overpriced). But if you look hard enough, you can find a bar...

So, we’re not sure if we made this up, or just picked it up along the way some place, but we’re going to go ahead and take credit for it because it appears that we are actually the first to publish it on the internet, and as everyone knows the internet is like the official hall of...

It’s a Tuesday home game today and that means it’s Ollie’s Bargain Night. All upper deck seats at the Yard tonight are $10, which is the cheapest you’ll ever get a ticket for a so-called “prime” game. If you’re like us, you scoff at prime games and...

Most people are pretty predictable drinkers. There’s definitely something to be said for having a go-to drink that can see you through thick and thin. It’s a great feeling to walk into your regular bar, good day or bad, and see your favorite bartender at the ready- say...

When we entered the Test it, Blog it, Win it contest a few months ago, it was a great opportunity for us not only to ‘test drive’ a brand new sofa, but also to fill a whole living room full of custom furniture from Su Casa. A couple of weeks ago we took delivery of our brand new...