Do they serve this stuff in other parts of the country? I’ve only ever seen it in Baltimore. Maybe we’re a test market - Rolling Stone Magazine did just crown us as “Best Scene” for 2008.

I wonder how people get sponsored by alcohol companies.

The Rolling Stone that comes out this week includes a big “Best of Rock” package, in which we call out the best metal band (Mastodon), best festival (Bonnaroo) and best radio station (Indie 103), among other superlatives. I worked on a piece that called out Baltimore (my hometown) as the best scene. This involved a 24-hour club-hopping tour of the city with awesome photographer Josh Rothstein. We hit rock clubs like Ottobar and Talking Head, the underground Floristree performance space and late-night diners Paper Moon and Golden West, but the most memorable moment was the hour Josh, Jason Urick of local band WZT Hearts and I spent trying to carry an old, drunk and angry (and heavy!) man we found face-down on the sidewalk to his house. Baltimore rocks!

There is kind of a weird shift going on here in town though around nightlife. Old bars have changed. No more smoking at bars means a lot of people have quit smoking altogether. It also seems like weird house shows and “alternative spaces” are kind of flourishing. This weekend, actually, I went to a show at BethlaHampden, a sometimes house-show venue put together by my co-worker at the Dog Temple who goes by the handle, Bow-Legged Gorilla. It was totally kickass, from beat-boxing over slide guitar to dub sounds on the turn-tables to some girl singing about her cat in Howard County with a wide-eyed grin the whole time. Even though it’s suddenly become trendy to call Baltimore “trendy” in the *good sense* of that word, it actually is kind of hot right now. And with all this rain, it’s only going to get hotter and hotter here. Global warming at work? Maybe we should become the first town to somehow “solve” Global Warming. That would really set us apart. Or somebody at Johns Hopkins who’s in the sandwich club at Eddie’s in Charles Village could spontaneously invent some infinite free energy source. I mean, fuck all this stuff about biofuels and ethanol and alternatives to whatever. Let’s go for free energy for everybody for life! Whoo! Baltimore!