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...

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...

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...

Hi David Sedaris. Welcome to Baltimore. We hope it’s nice and sunny today and you can walk around the Inner Harbor and get a crabcake for lunch and maybe even do some antiques shopping and sneak into Jay’s on Read for a drink after the show. Oh and we hope the show goes really...

Today is a big red letter day in Charm City. It’s the second day of Flowermart, the third day of the Maryland Film Festival, and Kinetic Sculpture Race day. What does this mean to you? It means if you’re going to any one of these, have fun. If you’re not, you probably...

After their one-off show at Hopkins a few weeks ago, The Stoop is back in its regular home at Centerstage tonight to present Culture Shock: Stories about confronting the new, strange, and often scary. We’ve written about the Stoop enough times now that we’re having trouble coming...

We’re heading down to Midtown Yacht Club tonight to drink beer and talk politics in the regular bi-weekly meeting of the Baltimore Chapter of Drinking Liberally. Midtown has been a nice spot for us all winter, but we couldn’t be happier to hear that the group will soon be moving...

Got to admit… We weren’t too impressed with that Monument lighting this year. It was freezing. It was packed. It was so much puppets and choir music. It was also pretty anti-climactic, as those sorts of things usually are. For those of you looking to come to Mount Vernon and be...

Well, it took a while, but the Chop has finally got our act together enough to buy a pair of advance tickets to something. We’re big on the pop-in, the drop-by, and the go-around-the-way. Whether it’s a band or a book signing or a baseball game, we don’t like to get locked...

Well, Baltimore, it’s been a long two weeks in America. A lot has happened since the last meeting of Drinking Liberally’s Baltimore Chapter, and heaven knows it’s made us thirsty, so we’ll be taking ourselves down to Midtown Yacht Club for pints and politics...

You might be surprised to hear it, but the Chop fully approves of hotel bars. Most often we find ourselves in one when we’re overseas. Many times hotel bars are the cream of the crop, and some countries’ bars are found to be so wanting that the hotel bar with the western visitors...

If there’s one activity that Baltimore likes to engage in collectively, it’s looking at itself in the proverbial mirror. It’s part of the reason we love the films of John Waters so much. It’s why we think The Wire was such a wonderful show, and it’s even why we...

No trip to Oriole Park is complete without a pre-game beer for happy hour, and between the Inner Harbor, Pickles and Sliders’, Pratt Street Ale House and the Chop’s favorite, California Tortilla there’s no shortage of options near the park. Unfortunately, this is not the case...

The Chop had a good idea once. It was the kind of idea that’s so good it can wake you up out of a sound sleep and demand your entire attention. It was the kind of idea that was so simple it was brilliant. But it was the dead of Winter, and eventually, the idea allowed itself to lie...

It’s a big old Saturday night in Baltimore, and the Chop in on the scene-uh, like a sex machine-uh. Much as we regret it, we can’t make it down to the Roller Derby tonight, but instead we’re going to stay uptown and make appearances at two other events. First we’re...

Got a calendar Baltimore? You need one nowadays to keep track of all the First Fridays and Second Saturdays and Third Thursdays they’ve been throwing at us lately. Of course, if you have a calendar, you’ve probably noticed that it’s Spring. Like for real. So it’s the...