MAryland Tailgating

[TontoKowalski]

I spent a significant amount of time in and around College Park and will now describe the most important pieces of information with regards to the bars there. Keep in mind, I walked away from the crown jewel of PG County eight years ago so some of myinformation could be out of date.

First, don't bother with the bars on Gameday. Tailgate in the cash lots. But if you want to see the scene, spend either Friday or Saturday night at the bars.

There are three bars in CP - Santa Fe, Cornerstone, and RJ Bentleys. Each bar seems to attract a certain clientele with certain attributes, and armed with this knowledge, a well-prepared swordsman can wreak a spectacular amount of human carnage. I flatter myself that I have carved such a swath.

Bentleys - easiest place for straight up sex. The girls who go here drink hard and on any night, 20% of the femalte population can be convinced into the sack. You will have to stay until the end, you and she will be utterly hammered, and you will have to spend some time observing at the outset, as the prime targets are mixed in among dozens of hapless decoys. The first time I went home with a girl from Bentleys, she puked on me during coitus. We kept going.

Cornerstone - highest percentage here. The girls are generally wealthier, nicer-dressed, more put-together, and massively more irritating (issues, not Issues). You will have a high percentage shot here, but the flip side is that you must listen to a few hours of unbelievably banal banter about her friends, her friends' cars, her parent issues, her mother's surgery, etc. You're thinking, no problem, if I know I'm getting laid I can deal with anything... in fact, an evening with a girl from Cornerstone is not unlike when pirates marooned captured sailors who wouldnt sign the articles of piracy with a single pistol shot on a desert island... after a while of enduring whatever woman you sit next to, that right hand starts to look pretty good...

Many Chapter 7s have their beginnings at Cornerstone.

Santa Fe - most chill place, best food, least likely to get laid. If there's such a thing as an ideal BC girl (smart, hot, athletic, fun), UMD's version of her comes here. Low shot at getting laid but if you have meticulous and exacting standards when it comes to women, this place is the likeliest to appeal to your sensibilities.

It also used to have a girl with ridiculous Keely Hazell cans waitressing - crowrds of men would show up to watch her do her thing, not unlike tour groups arriving at the pyramids.

En garde, swordsmen!

EDIT :: if anyone is going out in DC, I'll post recommendations for there. It's been seven/eight years... but some of the information may still hold true.

[eepstein0]

I live in DC now and will be at the game so I can give you suggestions on going out. Seriously though, even on Friday and Saturday Night, skip the College Park bars all together, just go into DC. The CP bar scene is accurately reflected above without my own personal stories which if I meet any of you on Saturday I'd be glad to share.

[Heightsman2]

Good info on bar scene, thanks all. I think we are going to go with tailgate - hopefully something other than turkey sandwiches. Maybe we'll hang some crab pots over the side of the car and catch lunch because as everyone knows, "Crabcakes and football - that's what Maryland does!"


Re: Slapfight. For the record, PG County is a paradoxical place. It has made a lot of strides in the past twenty years and is the wealthiest county in the country with a majority black population, but it does have some of the worst neighborhoods in the entire state. Maryland State Police did a twenty year study of crime trends in Maryland a few years ago and PG County, including areas pretty close to UMD, combined with Baltimore to make up 75% of statewide murders from 1986-2006 despite a combined 26% of state population. That study is discussed in this article on the State Police website, an interesting read. http://somd.com/news/headlines/2007/5809.shtml

This article in the Washington Post, hardly sensationalist, discusses a drop in crime in PG based on 2008 statistics, but validates the view that the area has a bad, bad problem with violent crime - rivalling the well-documented problems of DC itself.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/12/AR2009011201849.html

Here's a crime map for PG County that plots major crimes for the years 2007-2008. The map only plots 1000 crimes at a time, so you have to tweak it a bit to get it to show interesting things. Set the date parameters to begin Jan 1 2007 and end Dec 31 2008 and select homicides and look at PG County in and around CP/Hyattsville/Riverdale (nearby Adelphi is a whole different story). Not so great, and that's just homicides. http://pgcrime.info/

So, while I was just making a follow-on joke about the Wire (BTW, it was pretty obviously a joke so who's the defensive one, Pedro?) the comparison is not as far off as it may seem and isn't just a simple matter of implying that it is attributable to a generalized fear of minority areas. Do I think people hanging out in CP bars on gameday are really in danger of getting knifed? Not unless they get between Coach Fridge and a slab of prime rib ... (he's fat, that's another joke)

[TontoKowalski]

The only way you're going to be knifed in CP proper is if you go to the 24 hour laundromat at 3am and pick a fight with the guys playing pool there. In which case, not only will you be knifed, but since the laundromat plays easy listening, you will suffer the indignity of having the last thing you ever hear being Delilah dedicating a Wilson Phillips song to some lonely fat girl whose internet boyfriend just dumped her.

[pick6pedro]

Maryland State Police did a twenty year study of crime trends in Maryland a few years ago and PG County, including areas pretty close to UMD, combined with Baltimore to make up 75% of statewide murders from 1986-2006 despite a combined 26% of state population. http://somd.com/news/headlines/2007/5809.shtml

Combining PG and Baltimore County to show that 75% of state murders occur there does nothing since 95% could be attributable to B'more (not true, but an example of how this stat is misleading). The statistic in that article that is more telling to what I am saying is the murder rate out of 100,000 for each area. Nearly 16 out of 100,000 in PG County and 44/100,000 in Baltimore means, while PG's murder rate is on the high side, that you're about 3 times more likely to get murdered in Baltimore than all of PG, which makes my point to an extent. This still doesn't show Ballmer v. CP (as I've only been discussing CP, not PG as a whole).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/12/AR2009011201849.html

2nd article does nothing to compare to Ballmer to PG or CP.

http://pgcrime.info/

3rd one - while there is a concentration below CP in Hyattsville, those who know the area are aware that the campus is well above those dots and basically right below the beltway. It's a gross mistake to attribute the homicides closer to the DC border to CP.

So, while I was just making a follow-on joke about the Wire (BTW, it was pretty obviously a joke so who's the defensive one, Pedro?) the comparison is not as far off as it may seem and isn't just a simple matter of implying that it is attributable to a generalized fear of minority areas. Do I think people hanging out in CP bars on gameday are really in danger of getting knifed? Not unless they get between Coach Fridge and a slab of prime rib ... (he's fat, that's another joke)

I knew that it was a joke all along and still realize that. My point was not just aimed you - it was aimed at the broader notion of the similarities that I wanted to ensure were not misinterpreted by the easily scared pale-skins that may or may not lurk here. Think about it as a public service announcement for traveling fans. I'm a modern day Gandhi.

Suburbs versus inner city, dense population versus spread out, university setting for specifically where the BC fans will be versus abandoned row houses and stacked corners, etc. And of course proximity which is not a contested fact. I'm glad you did the research and in all sincerity do appreciate the info, but it was entirely a waste of your time. It sums up exactly what I said: CP isn't Baltimore, but it's not CH either.

[SJeagle09]

I

Santa Fe - most chill place, best food, least likely to get laid. If there's such a thing as an ideal BC girl (smart, hot, athletic, fun), UMD's version of her comes here. Low shot at getting laid but if you have meticulous and exacting standards when it comes to women, this place is the likeliest to appeal to your sensibilities.

I believe "Fe" as the local frat guys call it, was recently bought by Steve Francis.

[Heightsman2]

Well, the "research" was about 5 mins. of Google, so not really much time wasted, and I'm sincerely glad you enjoyed it.

I'm not interested in prolonging the Slapfight by getting into an endless round of rebuttals. It was an obvious joke comparison between a fictional, albeit very well done and therefore real-seeming and thought-provoking, TV program about inner city crime to actual danger in MD's campus environs. I believe you when you say your apparent sensitivity/defensiveness about the joke was out of a sense of community service or "Gandhi" do-gooderism. I'm also charitably confident that your statement that any comparison between CP and Baltimore could only be based on race didn't intend to imply that those who would make such a comparison must be racist.

You seem like a good guy. I read your stuff on the ESPN blog, and I think we actually agree on most of this, especially that tailgaters are perfectly safe in and around MD campus. In fact, feel free to PM me and you're welcome to stop by the tailgate. I may even be able to introduce you to a buddy of mine from high school who is running for office in PG County and can talk at length about its many successes and many problems, including violent crime areas not so far from UMD campus. In fact, I'll likely see Governor O'Malley (former B'more mayor) this evening, and I'll introduce you to him if he happens to be at the game - I'm sure his tailgate would be better!

As a single point of rebuttal (and really we should cut off the rebuttals at this point), College Park itself is not majority black but heavily white (69% white, 15% black, 10% Asian per the 2000 Census figures; that may well have shifted some since but is still in no way comparable to majority black Baltimore). So, while you claim you have been talking only about the immediate College Park area around the campus all along and that any PG crime statistics are therefore inapt, originally you equated CP's black population with Baltimore's. I think one could thus be forgiven for thinking you must have been referring to the larger area around College Park to which the statistics, Post article and crime map unfortunately do apply. Further reference your latest comment about fearful "pale skins" suggesting that you must have been talking about a majority black locale.

Is the area around campus like the Baltimore slums - well no, of course not, hence "joke" aspect of it all. Is there some serious violent shit going on not too far from there - unfortunately yes.

[MilitantEagle]

The only way you're going to be knifed in CP proper is if you go to the 24 hour laundromat at 3am and pick a fight with the guys playing pool there. In which case, not only will you be knifed, but since the laundromat plays easy listening, you will suffer the indignity of having the last thing you ever hear being Delilah dedicating a Wilson Phillips song to some lonely fat girl whose internet boyfriend just dumped her.

This world needs more posts from Tonto/Tyler Durden.

[pick6pedro]

The racial comments were more me being flip than anything. And to be honest I wasn't aware that CP was so predominantly white as those stats show. Anyway, good stuff.

[eepstein0]

This reeks of a Nametag event in College Park on Saturday.

Name
EO Handle
Tax Bracket

[pick6pedro]

This reeks of a Nametag event in College Park on Saturday.

Name
EO Handle
Tax Bracket

I'm going to wear a Rutgers hat and a strap-on dildo with an "HJS" nametag hanging from the tip.

[bignick33]

I'm going to wear a Rutgers hat and a strap-on dildo with an "HJS" nametag hanging from the tip.

I have the feeling that TRE will be posing a photo-shopped image of this very shortly.

Exalt.