So I (and more than likely you too) hear a few days ago that Paula Deen, The Food Network star whose claim to fame is pretty much every dish having a very strong possibility of giving you a heart attack, was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. This should come as no shock to anyone, judging by the food made on her show and served in her restaurant. I’ve never watched her show except without sound at the gym every so often, how ironic?! I don’t believe she touts moderation, as probably a spoonful of one of her dishes would be your daily allotted amount of butter. This in and of itself doesn’t bother me, hey if she wants to cook food that will kill people, it’s their fault for making/eating it. I’m sure it’s delicious, as she is super famous.

However, as we’ve all come to learn Ms. Deen was diagnosed 3 years ago, and only announced that she has Diabetes now because she “had to get her head around it.” Well it just so happens she also has a promo deal with a drug company to shill their Diabetes drug Victoza, through a website: www.diabetesinanewlight.com.

WHAT A FUCKING COINCIDENCE.

Now i’m fine if a famous chef wants to help people with diabetes still eat tasty meals and not send themselves in a coma. What i am not fine with, is a chef who is famous for making rich, fatty, sugar filled foods that SHE HASN’T BEEN ABLE TO EAT FOR 3 YEARS, and then using her own stardom and diabetes to pimp their new drug. Anthony Bourdain recently took to Twitter to renew his hatred for Lady (of Lady & Sons) with a poignant “I should take up breaking legs, so i can then sell crutches.” She responded “get a life” (SICK BURN). He also said “her food sucks” ().

I’m with – and you probably are too – Bourdain on this one. This is like if Sara McLaughlin suddenly started promoting depression medication in commercials that aired directly after her goddamn ASPCA commercials. This is the WORST example of synergy i’ve ever heard in my life. People emulate this dumb bitch, she has to know that. It’s so completely irresponsible of her to get famous by cooking food that likely gave her diabetes, continuing to get rich by cooking this shit, not telling anyone, and then get even more rich by dropping a “bombshell” that she has diabetes and “oh by the way, buy these chemicals that will help your diabetes.” I looked at an example recipe (looks like you have to sign up to get into the site) and there is not one goddamn pat of butter in it.

You may be saying, “she just got famous cooking that shit, nobody wants to see Paula Deen cooking healthy!” Well then maybe nobody SHOULD watch Paula Deen, ever. She can’t eat her goddamn food anymore because it gave her a disease, why should she continue to be on TV showing people how to make it? I think a lot of people watch her because it’s hilarious how unhealthy her dishes are. I bet MORE people are such dumb fatties that they think “this lady is in a league with Rachel Ray and *insert food network star*, this stuff can’t be that bad for you!” Why do we want to make someone who is encouraging people in an increasingly obese and unhealthy country to eat stuff that will most definitely kill you, famous?

Not to mention, her fucking drug will probably give you thyroid cancer.

From the Victoza site:

In animal studies, Victoza® caused thyroid tumors—including thyroid cancer—in some rats and mice. It is not known whether Victoza® causes thyroid tumors or a type of thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid cancer (MTC) in people which may be fatal if not detected and treated early. Do not use Victoza® if you or any of your family members have a history of MTC or if you have Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia syndrome type 2 (MEN 2). While taking Victoza®, tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck, hoarseness, trouble swallowing, or shortness of breath. These may be symptoms of thyroid cancer.

Thanks Paula Deen! Have a great day killing America!

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For those of you squinting at the screen, allow me to summarize and provide a typed transcript of the comments (to the best of my ability).

The original poster had decided to add detail to the physical description by adding:

Very dark complexion.

In a fit of unbridled righteous indignation, a concerned citizen took it upon himself or herself to let the victim of a burglary know that they were racist. They circled the word “African American” and wrote:

It already says African American. Was this necessary?

Well apparently another resident saw this addition and decided that an opportunity to climb up on a high horse is not something to be missed. They wrote:

I don’t fucking think so!

Someone else chimed in with:

What is white? Very very white???

Um, WHAT?! Seriously?! I would not be offended if someone said I was a white male, very pale. Because, you know what? I am. Not everyone of a particular race or ethnicity has the same skin tone. I thought that was rather obvious. Apparently not.

And yes, the final comment was mine (sorry for the horrible handwriting):

Some African Americans are light skinned and some are darker… Not racist.

There wasn’t really space but here is what I wanted to say:

“Um, what the fuck? What the actual fuck? One of our neighbors was burglarized. I’m sure he or she is feeling completely violated and horrified. All the victim was trying to do was inform their neighbors of what happened so that they can be careful, and to give a physical description of the suspect. You people called him or her a racist and tried to make the victim feel bad. Good. Do you feel better about yourself now? Do you you have so much superiority that find it offensive to describe a person’s physical appearance? “Dark complexion” is a physical descriptor and a statement of fact. The poster didn’t say “suspect was a real darkie.” Honestly! There is nothing inherently racist about describing someone’s physical characteristics. Are we so politically correct these days that a victim can’t describe the suspect without being attacked for describing physical features in a factual manner?”

What do you guys think? Am I overreacting? Am I the one being racially insensitive? Or are my neighbors just dicks who would make a victim feel worse so that they can feel superior?

P.S. Before anyone asks if it was maybe the landlord that posted it… the landlord is a very dark skinned African American.

P.P.S. Sorry if that made me sound racist.

P.P.P.S. I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

Evan: Actually I would have been pretty satisfied with “black” as a description since the guy could have been Haitian, or Dominican, or British for all we know. I’m surprised that whoever deemed it necessary to mark up this notice for its presumed racism didn’t point out the lack of  ’ ” ‘ to denote inches in the physical description, I mean if you’re going to be passive aggressive you might as well do it right! I’d also like to point out something that no one seems to have batted an eyelash at thus far in the posted notice: The 2nd part of the description, which details that the MacBook thief was wearing light blue scrubs and a stethoscope. PAGING DOCTOR MCROBBERSON! Send the squad cars to Mercy Medical and start a department wide sweep, shouldn’t be too hard to find a really tall, really black doctor with a MacBook under his arm!

Andy: You’re an asshole.

Evan:  A really really white asshole.

No related posts.

So there I am, sitting in my living room last night wondering what to watch after the Ravens much-to-be-expected W over Cleveland when I suddenly see this promo on The “Learning” Channel – TLC – whose programming could be used for the forces of good but instead typically highlight gigantic people having babies into toilets. This here special Virgin Diaries features, pretty obviously, people who either choose to be virgins or have had no luck losing their virginity at somewhat older (30-35) age ranges. It’s mostly dull; a trio of virgin girls living together in British Columbia waiting for marriage, a lonely guy in Maryland who just can’t seem to get laid, …

…and then this couple, the male counterpart of which is 31 and has never kissed a girl. Coz well, he’s waiting for marriage. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for the most part, nothing really. These uh, “kids” are pretty happy together and are very excited about being able to kiss! And have the foreplay! And it is totally and utterly and horrifically awkward when they finally do kiss at the altar…

… and continue to do so afterward every few minutes during the reception! I’m not even exaggerating when I say I had to physically turn away from the screen during these scenes, that’s how awkward it is. But hey, they’re happy and I’m rendered sterile. It’s a win-win!

So set your DVR’s folks, if you missed it and you want to be out-awkwarded by these guys, you won’t be disappointed. One Youtube commenter in particular put it pretty succinctly, actually:

i think i need to watch 2 girls one cup ..just? to feel normal again

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And so it was, 2.5 years ago when the world was at the height of its almost irritating obsession with bacon when someone emailed me the apparent existence of a product – J&D’s Bacon Lube. Known for their oddball bacon products like Bacon Salt, Bacon Mayonnaise and various other bacon-related foods (but no actual bacon) it appeared as though J&D Foods was moving into the adult lubricant market. My general reaction was something like “WHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY” but it seemed almost entertaining enough to try out, if for no other reason than to add to my Museum of Unusual Products Involving Food (MUPIF) – which actually exists – but it was later revealed “unfortunately” to be an April Fool’s prank by the pranking pranksters at J&D’s.

Prior to that, however, they included an email signup form for those interested in “testing” the lubricant. Which apparently, like myself, over 3,000 signed up for because shortly before the holiday I received an email literally titled “Baconlube is here” with this lil’ paragraph right in the middle:

After 3 years of development and countless lives ruined, baconlube is REAL. So who’s responsible for this creation coming to life? An intern named Martin, who sacrificed and offended his taste buds on sample after failed sample, and the barrage of emails we got from the members of the Meat-Flavored Lubricant Society. OK, that society is not real. But we assure you that baconlube is.

Welp, here we are folks. Bacon Lube. I guess if you love bacon and the use of lubricant for your …activities this is the perfect product for you! Me personally, I still have that bottle of bacon salt someone gave me three years ago so I’ll just dump that into a vat of Vaseline and mix it all up real good. Savings.

Related posts:

1. Alright J & D’s, we get it.
2. “That Bacon Guy”
3. Great Product? Or Greatest Product?

logic bomb down the wormhole

Ever heard of Mahaffey’s (2706 Dillon St., Canton) beer club? The much beloved neighborhood establishment known for its giant burgers and decent happy hour has its own rather impressive operation celebrating its patrons who consume vast quantities of beer, with scaled rewards starting at 100 (!) different beers all the way up to a thousand, from plaques to polo shirts, free mugs and happy hours. Seems like a pretty monumental task, doesn’t it? It is, one that only the most die-hard fans of drinking in general could achieve.

Challenging enough, in fact, that the beer club had its own page on the Mahaffey’s website. Complete with a leaderboard, listings for upcoming beers, a full list of the rules for the beer club and any other pertinent information relating to said beer club, members routinely check the page in order to plan their drinking schedules and jockey for top position in the pantheon of drinkingania. In short, it’s a big deal to those involved.

At least it was, until a little while ago when – word on the street has it – a certain personnel was let go from the other Mahaffey establishment, Bistro Rx, who just so happened to be a sig O to one Mahaffey’s dot com’s web master.

And *poof*, say PEACE OUT to the beer club website! …as well as the front page and all other related pages on Mahaffey’s dot com (the rules for the beer club are still available on their Facebook page however). Obviously I don’t know the ins and outs of what would appear to be a dispute of a personal nature between owners/employers/employees and significant others, but damn talk about revenge tactics! That is unless it’s merely a temporary pulldown of the site, in which case it won’t matter really in the long run. I’d be hella pissed if I were in the beer club and my precious beer club website disappeared! Or probably if I owned Mahaffey’s too, either way.

What say you? Over the line? Kinda funny? He had it coming?

–insert email from Mahaffey plz to read–

All right, so what’s happening with the website… A lot of you have noticed that mahaffeyspub.com has been down since Sunday evening. Please know that, from our end, this was uncontrollable. Screws fall out all the time; the world is an imperfest place. However, it will be back up as soon as humanly possible and, with the adjustments that we are making behind the scenes, this catastrophic event should never happen again.

Please rest assured that the beers you purchase and enjoy until that time will be logged in as soon as the site is back up. In the mean time, since you cannot tell online which beers you have had and have not had, we are making an even bigger endeavor to bring in as many new beers as possible so that, by seeing the beer in italics on the beer list, there will be no equivocation on your part.

No related posts.

(update: A small gathering to hang out and reminisce about OMG will be held at Little Italy’s Chipparelli’s this Sunday at 7:30pm. via Gorelick)

Today is something of a shitty day for the Baltimore area Internet, for one of its more inexplicably entertaining individuals has passed: Owl Meat Gravy, aka Bob (in real life). Bob was a frequent – almost obsessive at times (yet still pretty funny) – commenter on at-that-time Baltimore Sun’s Dining at Large as well as Midnight Sun, both of which have their own collections/recollections of OMG material today (here, here).

I met Bob a few times in person, we mostly got really drunk at one bar or another and discussed the strange nature of Baltimore’s online community, including how funny/necessary it was for him to invent multiple personas on the D@L to get into full scale comment fights with each other “just to liven things up a bit.” Our favorite collective experience was the concoction of horribly named bars with terrible themes, a feature posted on Midnight Sun once upon a time, where our long-standing inside joke (among probably six of us), a bar named C.H.U.D.s – the place for C.H.U.D.s – was born. A close 2nd was XTREME Cilantro, a spoof on the now defunct Green Cilantro, in which large amounts of cilantro were ejected from a cannon to ensure the most XTREME visit possible. Hilarious.

Shortly after our bar drinking came last year’s Mobbies awards ceremony, during which OMG had something of a Twitter Tantrum because no one knew he was in the back and/or assumed he wanted to remain anonymous and was glossed over somewhat for his dual-winning of two categories, Best Personal Twitter and Best Misfits Blog. He lamented the process of voting, he cursed the Baltimore Sun, cursed a few random people, cursed Twitter, and then later came back to Twitter and apologized. I saw him shortly after that, we all kind of laughed about it. I hadn’t really seen him since, but usually wondered when I would bump into him again.

Overwhelmingly though, every single interaction most folks had with Bob was via the Internet, making his presence in Baltimore ethereal rather than …real – and now that he’s gone, his (and yours, and mine) Facebook profile, Twitter feed and every single comment left on the Baltimore Internet becomes his digital tomb. It’s chilling. So long as no one has access to whatever passwords he was using for those respective accounts, they remain closed to any control from outside parties and are simply frozen in time. We’re living in an age during which people can actually be born, live their entire lives and die on the internet – so I suppose in addition to adding that “Expecting” status, Facebook might as well go right ahead and add a “Deceased” option to any individual’s profile. In the case of Bob, the Internet isn’t just how folks knew him best, but also how most people really didn’t know him at all. Pretty sure that’s how he liked it.

Be that as it may, if you want a few (ok, more than a few) laughs, check out OMG’s Twitter feed. You’ll see gems like this:

I wish there were urban wood nymphs. Urban unicorns? That's just a guy with a dildo strapped to his forehead.

July 29, 2011 5:57 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@OwlMeatGravy

Owl Meat Gravy

Far more often, you’ll see pervvy Tweets aimed at females, but it’s all kind of funny regardless.

No related posts.

tl;dr Baltimore is dangerous

Baltimore’s long-standing tradition of horrible violence as celebration for our nation’s independence continued unabated Monday night as a nonfatal shooting, a fatal stabbing, and a toddler getting shot in the leg managed to happen despite the boosted presence of police, surveillance, GPS enable lasers and a fleet of battleships in the Downtown area. Which, despite the on-the-record disappointment from police chief Bealefeld and Mayor SRB, we’re basically demonstrating to everyone that the police absolutely cannot prevent this from happening on an annual basis, no matter what you throw at it.

I mean, that’s the long and the short of it, correct? That all the cameras in the world can’t really prevent a guy from shooting your 4 year old in the crotch, because it’s so crowded that police can’t get to the scene?

It’s bedlam. Bedlam that reflects the most poorly on this city, demonstrating that as a society we aren’t even capable of keeping our tourist gems and areas that are literally two blocks away from Police Headquarters safe. Never mind the apathy we project daily to those murdered on the West Side – Baltimore’s own brand of “meh” toward its problems with violence, we can’t even keep our shit together for one night, in a city which produced our nation’s anthem where we ought to be truly proud to be Americans. Instead, we perpetuate the reality of Baltimore as the 8th most dangerous city.

Calgon, take me away!

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So’s I caught wind of a tale of woe the other day, regarding what should have been a really fun slash amazing party fun time courtesy of Baltimore’s Living Social bureau. It was a $60 ziplining slash open bar special, in which purchasers of the excursion would park their vehicle at the Port Covington Walmart (RED FLAG) and be provided transportation to Sandy Spring Friends School where frolicking, ziplining and climbing would ensue for two hours. Following that, an hour of libations at Federal Hill’s own Muggsy’s Mug House – sounds like a pretty rad time, doesn’t it? Of course it does!

Being the responsible fun-time arrangers that they are, Living Social did their due diligence in clearing the whole parking lot situation with the Port Covington facilities, and everything looked as though the good times were rolling.

…unfortunately, once the buses had been loaded and the trek had begun, phone calls came issuing that every single person’s car at the Port Covington Walmart was in the process of being towed. Whether via a dumb manager who didn’t know about the deal or whatever excuse Walmart came up with, dozens of cars were towed within minutes, leaving a bunch of really pissed off people sitting on a bus without a car. And we all know how understanding those tow companies are, very courteous and kind-hearted folk who would gladly take part in owning up to the mistake and return everyone’s car without hesitation, yes? Yeah well not really. The Living Social rep I spoke with referred to it as “an awful mess” and essentially they’re on the hook paying for all of the headaches generated by the snafu, despite the fact that Walmart is essentially to blame. I smell lawsuit! Or maybe not, hopefully the two enterprises can work out the issue and Living Social will have a parking lot to use for their future expeditions.

Speaking of the Port Covington Walmart, I’m going to go right ahead and make a wild guess that it will close its doors riiiiiight around the same time as the Remington Walmart opens, for a myriad of excuses which are all bullshit, leaving the destroyed wetlands of Port Covington with their very own gigantic wasteland of empty warehouse buildings and sprawling parking lots. Perfect place to hang out after dark! (and then the inevitable redevelopment featuring mixed-use retail/condos, amirite?)

No related posts.

And then this happened:

Red Sox Baseball!!!

May 16, 2011 11:09 pm via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@FOP3

Baltimore FOP #3

OH NO YOU DI’INT. Really Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 of Baltimore Maryland? Really?

See if I donate to get my bumper sticker this year. Just see.

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Tabrizi's, 1221 Key Hwy, revocation hrg, lic suspended 30 days (July 2011) based on counsel's misleading stmts + disturb peace

April 28, 2011 1:47 pm via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@BaltoBeerBaron

Steve Fogleman

Hot off the Twitter presses, it looks like the residents of Harborview and parties involved in the run on Tabrizi’s liquor license and its associated entity – the Tiki Barge – have won a partial victory with a 30 day suspension. Tiki Barge first came under protest in February when residents of the Harborview community took issue with the loudness, the simulated sex with potted plants, and other things occurring over last summer’s blockbuster debut of the floating party barge. So essentially, no booze at Harborview starting July 1st until their license is restored.

Here’s the breakdown of the reasoning, via Steve Fogleman:

Tiki barge was suspended due to licensee’s last minute security last summer. We are confident the situation will improve there. When [approved] last year, Counsel for tiki barge gave [the Liquor Board] a letter of approval from a “community group” that was actually controlled by the developer. Counsel for tiki barge also implied the barge was mostly to be used by residents. The bar is a great concept, but we weren’t told the true story. Going forward, we like the tiki barge. The penalty was for past misrepresentations and initial lax security.

In other words, “See yall real soon!” (that’s the Tiki Barge talking) Sad to see that the organizers entrenched themselves in a dodgy methodology for getting the whole Barge up and running; I can’t help but wonder if they had been forthright with the residents of Harborview and said “Yeah, we’re gonna turn this thing into a raging blowout every weekend” whether they would have existed in the first place (guessing not). Still, considering the circumstances I suppose Bud Craven and his folks are / ought to be pleased, as they’ll at the very least be able to open again, rather than not at all.

Related posts:

1. Liquor Board reverses Tiki Barge Suspension
2. The Beer Baron update
3. Tiki Barge under fire, rallies support