“Oh, Baltimore…”

BYOG = Bring Your Own Gloves.
Okay, so the band FUCK YEAH, DINOSAURS! is from Pittsburgh and FERRETT is from NYC… but whatevs.

Albums by Fuck Yeah, Dinosaurs! include:

Jurassic Drunks (2018) featuring songs “TerrorDactyl,” “Raptors on Acid” and “These Are the People I Want To See (Eaten By the Dinosaurs)”

65 Million Beers Ago (2020) featuring songs “Jiggly Jello,” “Life, Uh, Finds a Way” and “Bactrim”

Albums by Ferrett include:

Glamdemic (2024) featuring songs “It’s Not Hard To Let Go,” “Hat Trick,” “Drinking Beers” and “Amber Alert”

It’s always 2 O’clock somewhere.
Justice: You Gotta Make It Stick!
In Baltimore, we even tag sharks.
OMGesus… don’t ask me.

“Looking Up: The Guggenheim”

The Gugg in NYC from May 2024
It seems to me the couple at left should swap shirts!
Jenny Holzer’s “Light Line” exhibition presents written word pieces in various formats to challenge conventional power structures. Redacted government documents and Trump tweets are just two of the devices employed in showing how language can both bind us and divide us. It may tell the truth and also obscure it. Talk is cheap, but its consequences — from lies and fabrications that led to the Iraq War or to a Trump presidency — can be quite expensive.
Some words are like music… GUILTY!!

“Match.john”

Harbor East in Baltimore from May 2024

“Have you experienced the awkward avoidance of eye contact during a first date? And wouldn’t you rather enjoy a shared meal without the unwanted interruption of bathroom visits? If the answer is YES, then you simply must try the hottest new matchmaking service on the market. For a breath of fresh air, visit us at Match.john for your free trial membership today!”

After a public outcry by the ACLU over Baltimore’s heteronormative port-a-john display, a bi-weekly (get it?) rotation was established!

“Just Another Mencken Monday”

“I sincerely hope that the nobility and gentry of the lowlands will not make the colossal mistake of viewing this trial of Scopes as a trivial farce. Full of rustic japes and in bad taste, it is, to be sure, somewhat comic on the surface. One laughs to see lawyers sweat. The jury, marched down Broadway, would set New York by the ears. But all of that is only skin deep… when the curtain falls at least all the laughter may be coming from the yokels. You probably laughed at the Prohibitionists, say, back in 1914. Well, don’t make the same error twice… Now the clowns turn out to be armed, and have begun to shoot.”

— HL mencken for The Baltimore Evening sun in July 1925
“EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it!”
William Jennings Bryan, witness for God and the prosecution at the Scopes (Monkey) Trial in Dayton, TN, during the summer of 1925.

So here we are almost 100 years later and the fundamentalist wingnuts are back at it, rolling back reproductive rights, banning (if not burning) books, and supporting any odd charlatan (idiots like MTG and fork-tongued opportunists like JD “My Book Was Wildly Overrated” Vance) who will gladly hitch a slop-wagon to their narrow-minded and self-interested agenda. The fact that a philandering, thrice-married libertine like Trumpf, who had “relations” with a porn star before paying her off, can carry the banner for the evangelical Right is an utter disgrace. Sodom meet, and be repeatedly violated by, Gomorrha. Trump’s new “God Bless the USA Bible” is probably scratch-n-sniff. No amount of Ariadne’s string could disentangle the sulfurous labyrinth of lies, distortions and hypocrisies that the GOP has erected for itself. One risks turning inward and falling into a state of catatonic despair. Except that, as Mencken states, “the clowns turn out to be armed and have begun to shoot.”