Everything I Know About Baltimore...

...I learned from Wikipedia.

In less than two weeks I will be flying to Baltimore for my uncle's wedding. I think this will be the first wedding I have been to since my other uncle got married in, um, was that 1996? Yes, I think this will be my first wedding in ten years. So I am excited about it. I am also excited about flying to Baltimore, not necessarily because it is Baltimore, but more because I like flying and airports (probably only because I don't spend a lot of time in them).

Anyway, as the event nears I am realizing that I don't really know much about Baltimore except that it is somewhere on the east coast. Baltimore and Boston could be neighbors for all I know (or knew, rather). So I did what any internet-savvy nerd would do, and I looked it up on the by-the-people-for-the-people internet knowledge database that is Wikipedia. Sure, people berate Wikipedia all the time for not being a real source of factual information, but I use it anyway. Most of the information I find on there seems accurate enough for my needs anyway.

Here are some interesting things about Balitmore which I didn't know before I learned about them on Wikipedia:

• Baltimore is in Maryland - Haha, no, just kidding. I actually knew that Baltimore was in Maryland. No really, I did.
• Baltimore has around 650,000 inhabitants - That is roughly 100,000 more than Denver, but is still kind of a cowtown compared to Nanjing, China which has about ten times that many people, or Beijing which has over TWENTY times that many people, but it isn't really fair to compare Chinese and American city populations. In 1950, however, the city had almost 1 million denizens, but the population has been shrinking since then (until recently in 2000 when it began to climb again).
  
• Baltimore is an independent city - it doesn't belong to any county government.
• In the War of 1812, the British declared Baltimore a "nest of Pirates."
• Baltimore is home to the world's tallest equilateral five-sided building (not to be confused with it's close cousin, the non-equliateral five-sided bilding). I wonder how many people walk by the Baltimore World Trade Center and say in awe, "wow, would you look at the lateral equality on that tall five-sided building!"
• Baltimore has a 311 non-emergency telephone hotline so people don't call 911 when they don't have emergencies. I should call it while I'm there just to see what it's all about.
• Baltimore has a lot of crime - It ranks second only to Detroit among the most dangerous large American cities. It has seven times the national murder rate, six times the rate in NYC, and three times the rate of LA.
• Baltimore's local culinary delicacies include blue crab and beer, where the crab is eaten with a mallet, a knife, and bare hands. Apparently the "chicken box" is popular too, consisting of fried chicken and starch (wait, wan't this invented in Kentucky, hence KFC?).
• The preferred beer is National Bohemian, a.k.a. "Natty Boh," or "National."
• Some scenes for the movie 12 Monkeys were filmed in Baltimore.

I also went to the Speech Accent Archive to listen to what a Baltimore accent sounds like. From the two samples they have of people from Baltimore, it sounds pretty standard, but it seems like there is some deletion of word-medial stops like 't' in "into" or in "plastic."

Today's video has nothing to do with Baltimore (I tried, but I couldn't find any Baltimore-related music videos that I liked). So it is Calle 13 instead. The last Calle 13 video I put up was Atrevete-te-te back in April, which is still an awesome song by the way (I think it means something like 'live a little!'). This one is called Jirafa which means 'giraffe.' I was going to put up a different Calle 13 song, Suave, but it was a little too risqué. In fact, I think this is the only song I've heard by Calle 13 that isn't even a little bit dirty; this one is more sweet and romantic.