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When you become culturally Mexican

Photo: Darlene Acero

HERE ARE 9 WAYS you know the cultural shift has happened, even if you have no idea how or when it occurred.

1. Your knife has been replaced by a tortilla.

2. You answer the phone saying, “Well?”

3. You say “provecho” (bon appétit) to anyone eating, at any moment.

4. You believe that mezcal is the best cure for colds, stomach bugs, heartache…

5. You no longer want to be touched by the rays of the sun but instead walk as close to buildings as possible to enjoy the thin line of shade they offer.

6. You instinctively look for salsa and tortillas when any meal is placed in front of you.

7. Random strangers talking to you no longer makes you want to run for fear of your life.

8. Being punctual includes being 30 minutes late. At least you turned up!

9. Rather than sneaking out of a party quietly, you pucker up when leaving and kiss every single person goodbye, whether you know them or not.

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23 signs you were born in Maine

Photo: Jeffrey Stylos

1. By third grade you were babysitting yourself and others.
2. You can rollerblade on a dirt road. Like a boss.
3. The first alcohol you drank was Orloff. And you liked it.
4. You’ve used a riding lawn mower to run an errand.
5. You went to school in a trailer.

Maine public schools are usually very low on funding. Students are more often than not attending classes in buildings that contain asbestos, have been flooded, or have been damaged by heavy winter weather. A popular solution is to gut a bunch of mobile homes, throw some desks and a couple whiteboards in ‘em, and park ‘em in the back parking lot.

6. Your extended family made up most of your high-school graduating class.

Cousins are everywhere. Seriously. You might think you met a super guy at the away game in Brewer last Friday night. You may have made out with him down on the long-jump mats. And you may have found out later from your mother that not only is he ‘that John John,’ your third cousin twice removed, but you also peed your pants in front of him at daycare.

7. You always play ‘the Name Game.’

When a Mainer meets another Mainer for the first time, the Name Game will not be stopped until both parties have found at least one person who they both know or with whom they’ve had some kind of interaction. And when found, that person will be the primary subject of conversation. Ex:

“Do you know Nancy from Newburgh? Nancy, Bill’s girl Nancy?”
(Silent and acknowledging nod.)
“Don’t know her myself but in Shaw’s last week, looked like she was goin’ through anotha’ divorce.”
“Ahh yup yup yup.”
8. You never lock doors.

No one’s more trusting than a Mainer running into the gas station to get himself a steamed red hot dog and a 6-pack of Buds. Keys are left in ignitions. Nokia first-generation car phones are left in plain view. And if something does get stolen, which is rare, it gives you something to discuss at Dysart’s for years (and years and years) to come.

9. You pack for impending snowstorms on your vacation.
10. Your grandmother shoots groundhogs from her kitchen window.
11. You put human hair in your garden to ward off deer.
12. You can have an entire conversation consisting of grunts in agreement.
13. You smile at strangers.

It’s almost creepy sometimes. Walking down a street in a small Maine community means you’ll get smiles, you’ll get ‘good mornings’, you’ll get waves from random people on the opposite side of the street. And you should expect to get stopped and asked what exactly it is you’re doing in Maine, how you like it, and where it is you come from.

Many small communities don’t get a lot of people from out of town. When they do, they want to know everything. To prove it, some Maine communities still have social sections in their newspapers. These are sections in the back that let the community know that, yes, those were indeed Dottie’s great grandchildren visiting her last Sunday. They enjoyed cucumber and cream-cheese sandwiches and a round of cribbage on the back porch.

14. You know people who’ve never left.

When a Mainer settles, they sink into the cloth of a community. Everything they need is on the land they own, in the diner they visit, or at the hardware store downtown. It’s not uncommon to meet a Mainer, of any generation, who’s never crossed state lines, or even county lines. On the account that it’s never been necessary.

15. You’re thrown into a downward spiral of rage when driving behind a Massachusetts driver.

Even if they did nothing, you consider looking at their license plate a huge inconvenience.

16. Your definition of ‘camp’ is a rundown cabin in the middle of the woods.
17. Coffee brandy is what you drink when you’re feeling fancy.
18. Your mom and all of her friends operate hair salons in their basements.
19. You wear Carhartts because it’s cold, not because you bought them at a thrift store in NYC.
20. You’ll swim in any body of water, no matter how cold, no matter how dark and questionable.
21. You measure distance in hours.
22. You know what a red hot dog is. And you’ll eat one.
23. And, of course, you survived the ice storm of ’98.

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60 ft waterfall in a canoe [video]

Twenty years ago, there were a few open boaters such as Dave Simpson who pioneered the hardest steep creeks alongside the best whitewater kayakers at the time. But since then, kayaking’s progression has rapidly outpaced canoeing in design and technique — particularly when it comes to running huge drops.

Part of this is just the nature of the craft: Open boats are simply bigger; their center of gravity is higher. They’re more difficult to hike in and out of remote regions.

But over the past couple of years there have been some sweet milestones. In 2012 an open boater paddled the Toxaway Gorge in North Carolina — among the hardest runs in the country — and just recently longtime river safety guru Jim Coffey styled this 60 footer in Costa Rica, breaking the open boat waterfall record that had stood since the early 90s.

So cool seeing open boaters run these drops; it’s kind of the equivalent of seeing people get monster barrels on longboards. The style and technique are just badass.

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I watched a Bangkok ping-pong show

Photo: Sobri

After a total of sixteen months in Bangkok, and at the request of an American girlfriend who was visiting, I agreed to go to a “ping-pong” show.

We had no idea which one to go to, so we were forced to depend on the kindness of a stranger — a man wearing a wig that looked like a turtle shell posing as hair who approached us as we were about to cross Surawong Road into red-light central. If the place he guided us to was the top of the line among ping-pong shows, things must have been pretty grim at the bottom. As soon as I took one glimpse at the drab decor, I wished we’d stayed at Hot Male, where several cute showboys had been making eyes at me. But you only live once.

And I really couldn’t say I’d lived until I’d had the pleasure of paying 400 baht (about $13) to sit in a dark, nearly empty bar while an amazingly well preserved 53-year-old woman (the proprietor — or madam — whose grown son was pouring drinks behind the bar) hit on me (didn’t the words “I’m gay” mean anything anymore?) and a procession of bored-looking women disrobed onstage.

The one with the most, um, skills, the apparent veteran of the bunch, looked like she should have been reading bedtime stories to her grandchildren somewhere. She did a stunt where she pulled a string with razor blades attached to it from her vagina, using one razor blade to engage in an arts and crafts project that she then presented to my friend and me, hoping for a drink in return.

Another attached a Coke bottle filled with water and then one filled with Coke to her vagina, occasionally positioning her body so that the liquid trickled inside of her. I was terrified that she was going to pour the remaining contents of those bottles onto us.

The least enthusiastic showgirl spent her entire time onstage just swaying to the beat like she didn’t have a care or a spectator in the world, apparently too shy to remove the bikini top and bottom she was wearing. Did Maroon 5 know what these women were doing to its hit song? “One More Night” sounded a lot better with Adam Levine’s abs providing visual accompaniment.

“What the hell is this?” I asked my friend as we watched the badly choreographed proceedings. In a city where hot females outnumbered hot males by a significant margin (not because there aren’t plenty of attractive men, but because Thai women, in general, are so ridiculously genetically blessed), I couldn’t believe that the owners of this particular ping-pong joint couldn’t find one woman who could hold a candle (which, thankfully, wasn’t one of the props) to any of the guys we’d seen earlier at Hot Male.

It had been my second Hot Male experience, and I still hadn’t gotten used to a show that involved several groups of two having nonsimulated sex onstage. This time a few of them even took the act into the crowd for a little bit of audience participation. God must not have been listening to my prayer, because one twosome stopped right in front of us so that the “bottom” could rest his head on my lap while the “top” stroked my chest. “How do they keep it in when they’re walking around like that?” my friend asked as they returned to the stage. I didn’t have a clue, and as much as I wanted to be a Bangkok host with all the answers, finding out that one wasn’t on my to-do list.

Not only were those women treating their private parts like toys, but they were using them as torture chambers, especially during the bit with the razor blades.

I was equally at a loss to explain the vagina Olympics, too. Just as my friend and I declared that we’d had enough and were preparing to exit, the moment we didn’t realize we’d been waiting for arrived. One of the women started to emit ping-pong serves from her vagina, while a customer seated in a chair in front of the stage tried to hit the balls with a ping-pong paddle. Ping-pong. Ping-pong. Ping-pong.

Once we were back outside, I wondered why I’d had such a strong negative reaction to the female revue. It wasn’t as if Hot Male was a bastion of respectability, but although I didn’t necessarily approve of what they were doing onstage there, I can’t say I didn’t kind of enjoy watching them do it. Was I reacting out of a sexual distaste for female nudity — or women in general? Maybe I was holding women to a different standard of conduct than men. Or perhaps it was that shows featuring female private parts simply weren’t created for gay men.

In Bangkok’s red-light district, nudity wasn’t sexy, and neither was sex. Hot Male and the ping-pong show were representative of one of my biggest problems with the Thai sex trade, an unfortunate dynamic that flowed over into the general population. When the emphasis was always on sex, especially in such a brutally forthright way, it began to lose its appeal to me. A surplus of sex created a deficit of desire.

A colleague once told me a story about how a country superstar she once interviewed told her he quit smoking by spending an entire weekend sucking on one cancer stick after the other. By Sunday evening, he never wanted to puff another one again. I guess the experiment could have gone one of two ways: the way it went, or it could have intensified his addiction. It might have been the same way with sex in Bangkok. The more some people got, the more they wanted, but because it was so often being shoved in front of my face, my sex drive had never been lower.

Perhaps it was also the influence of growing up in the relatively prudish US. Even in my wildest moments, I’d always been a closet Goody Two-shoes, and living in a city where I could walk down a crowded street in broad daylight and have spa workers proposition me and guys try to sell me gay and straight porn, where I could go into a spa for what I assumed would be an innocent hour-long massage and end up being molested by a middle-aged woman, brought out my inner angel.

If she and I had been on a date, that would have been one thing. I wasn’t above using a massage to get my way with someone. But there wouldn’t have been any money exchange, no undercurrent of violence and pain, all key components of the entertainment at Hot Male and ping-pong shows, as well as the professional Thai massage. For me, the latter, already such a rough experience, was much less rejuvenating with the threat — yes, threat — of sex hanging over it.

I once went out with someone who’d spent a year and a half living in Bangkok, and he was celibate the entire time. “How is that even possible?” I asked him. By the time I left Bangkok, I got it completely.

I can’t say the same thing about the ping-pong show. As extreme as the onstage action in Hot Male might have been, I understood its entertainment value. It was a joyous celebration of sex and sexuality that, in a sense, made fun of them both. Meanwhile, the ping-pong show was a bizarre onanistic display that no one — neither the performers nor the audience — seemed to enjoy. Not only were those women treating their private parts like toys, but they were using them as torture chambers, especially during the bit with the razor blades. It bordered on sadomasochism, which might have been one of my least favorite things to watch.

And on a purely aesthetic level, the ping-pong show was just such an eyesore. It was dark, drab, and joyless, like a windowless one-star hotel room. The women weren’t smiling, and neither were any of the six customers (including us).

Naked women and their vaginas deserved so much better.

The post I agreed to go to a “ping-pong” show appeared first on Matador Network.

Notes from the world's top freediver

William Trubridge is the world’s best freediver. Freediving is the act of diving without the use of a snorkel, scuba gear, or any other breathing apparatus. Basically, you’re just going down there and holding your breath for as long as you can.

Trubridge has dived to a depth of 100 meters — approximately 330 feet — without assistance. And he didn’t die. This short journalistic piece on Trubridge documents his life before freediving (of course he was basically raised in the ocean), his efforts in the sport, and his philosophy on it.

Probably most interesting is his statement that freediving is as much mental as it is physical. I for one can’t imagine diving that deep, or for that long a period of time, without feeling the sense of deep, instinctive panic you get when you go underwater for too long. Trubridge’s approach seems more zen and meditative than athletic — though obviously he’s in incredible shape. To overcome the body’s most basic need — the need for oxygen — sheerly through the force of your mind is what’s most incredible about Trubridge’s accomplishments.

The post Living without air: Notes from the world’s best freediver appeared first on Matador Network.

15 legendary recording studios

I was visiting London a few weeks ago and on a slow day decided to do the Beatles walking tour (which was inevitably called the “Magical Mystery Tour”). The tour of course ended at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in northwest London, and I got to see no fewer than six tourists nearly get killed stepping directly into oncoming traffic while trying to catch the iconic crosswalk photo.

Modern music fans usually don’t listen to music live, unlike our ancestors, who listened to live music exclusively. As I stood outside Abbey Road Studios and watched a 16-year-old Colombian girl weep at the site where the likes of “Golden Slumbers,” “A Day in the Life,” and “All You Need Is Love” were recorded, I realized that a musical tour of the world — a tour of the songs that moved you to tears, or helped you through a hard time, or amped you up for a big moment — would actually be a tour of the studios, these often nondescript buildings that are typically hidden in plain sight in our cities. Here are some of the world’s greatest studios.

Abbey Road Studios

The studio itself doesn’t stand out particularly from the rest of the buildings around it, and it sits in a fairly quiet posh northwestern London suburb. If it weren’t for the tourists crowding the crosswalk and the Beatles-related graffiti covering its outer gate, one might pass and never notice it. The most famous image of Abbey Road is of course the crosswalk right outside the studio. Vehicles in London are legally required to wait at so-called “zebra crossings” as long as you physically stay in motion, so you can take as long as you like taking your picture, as long as you move in slow motion.

Aside from most of the Beatles albums, Abbey Road (formerly EMI Studios) is also the recording site of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Duran Duran’s eponymous debut album (1981), parts of Radiohead’s The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997), and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way (2011).

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The Dungeon

The Dungeon is probably better known for the hip-hop collective that was born out of it, the Dungeon Family. The Dungeon itself was a studio in producer Rico Wade’s mother’s basement in Atlanta, Georgia, but the collective has included some of the greatest hip-hop acts of the South and, consequently, of all time.

At the top left is the only picture I’ve been able to find of the Dungeon — pictured in it are the Dungeon Family and production-company founders of Organized Noize, Sleepy Brown, Ray Murray, and Rico Wade (from left to right). Probably the most famous members of the Dungeon Family are Big Boi and Andre 3000 (bottom left). Virtually all of Outkast’s albums were recorded with the Dungeon Family. It’s also the home of Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo Green, Bubba Sparxxx, Janelle Monae, and Future (pictured to the right with a Dungeon Family tattoo on his forearms).

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Muscle Shoals Sound Studio

Muscle Shoals may be best known for a song that wasn’t recorded at Muscle Shoals: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” One of the lines is “Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers / And they been known to pick a song or two.” Muscle Shoals was formed when a band, the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section (nicknamed the Swampers) broke away from the great FAME Studios nearby and formed their own. While they’ve got a slightly bigger studio these days, it’s still in the tiny town of Muscle Shoals, way off the beaten path in northwestern Alabama.

Even though the original studio looked like a roadside mechanic’s garage, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio would go on to record tracks for the likes of the Rolling Stones (“Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” from Sticky Fingers in 1971), Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” (1973), Bob Seger’s Night Moves (1976), the Black Keys’ awesome Brothers (2009, at the new studio), and, of course, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s first album (but not released till much later), Skynyrd’s First (1978).

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Trident Studios

It’s hard to understate how important London studios were to rock ‘n’ roll in the ’60s and ’70s, and high among those studios was Trident. Tucked back in an alley in London’s posh Soho neighborhood, Trident is barely noticeable from the street, and it takes a little bit of searching to even realize it’s a studio.

Relative anonymity aside, Trident Studios were responsible for the discovery of Queen and their first four albums, Queen (1973), Queen II (1974), Sheer Heart Attack (1974), and A Night at the Opera (1975), as well as James Taylor’s eponymous debut album (1968), the Rolling Stones’ Let it Bleed (1969), David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars (1972), and Lou Reed’s Transformer (1972).

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Sunset Sound Recorders

On the other side of the world, we have Sunset Sound Recorders, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. It was originally built for recording the music to Walt Disney movies, and you can thank them for Mary Poppins, Bambi, and 101 Dalmatians, but they went on to much greater rock heights.

Probably the most famous album recorded here was the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street (1972, and pictured above), generally believed to be their best ever, but it was also the home of the Beach Boys’ best album, Pet Sounds (1966). My personal favorites, however, are Led Zeppelin’s albums Led Zeppelin II (1969) and Led Zeppelin IV (1972), both of which were partially recorded and mixed here. Other famous ones include the Doors’ The Doors (1967) and Strange Days (1967), Jet’s Get Born (2003), the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and, of course, Macy Gray’s On How Life Is (2000).

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Headley Grange

Headley Grange is a former poorhouse in Headley, England, and it gets on this list for a single reason: its stairwell. During a recording session in the room next door, Jimmy Page was trying out the riff to “When the Levee Breaks,” when the crew started setting up John Bonham’s drum kit in the hall. He went out, start playing, and they recorded it from the stairwell. The result is one of rock’s best ever sounds. Bad Company, Fleetwood Mac, Genesis, and Peter Frampton recorded here as well.

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Motown

Of course Motown is on here. Technically, the studio itself is called “Hitsville, U.S.A.” (now a museum, pictured at the bottom), but the site was also the home of Motown’s headquarters in Detroit, and as such I’m calling it Motown. It was without a doubt one of the most important recording studios of all time, and if you say the name “Motown” now, it evokes an entire genre of music put out by Berry Gordy’s Motown label.

Among the many great albums recorded at Hitsville are Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971) and Let’s Get it On (1973), the Jackson 5’s debut Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5 (1969 — Ross and the Supremes are pictured at the top left with Berry Gordy), the Marvelettes’ Please Mr. Postman (1961), and Stevie Wonder’s debut, The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie (1962).

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Electric Lady Studios

Electric Lady Studios (as you’ve probably guessed) was founded by Jimi Hendrix after how much it cost him to record his epic album Electric Ladyland. Hendrix was only able to use the studio for four weeks before he died, but the studio, in New York’s Greenwich Village, is still very much in use.

We can thank Electric Lady Studios for Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy (1973) and Physical Graffiti (1975), Patti Smith’s Horses (1975) The Clash’s Combat Rock (1982), Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell (1983) Weezer’s eponymous 1995 album, Santana’s Supernatural (1999), the White Stripes’ De Stijl (2000), the Roots’ Game Theory (2006), as well as a ton of Kiss albums.

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Sun Studio

We’ve been focusing a lot on rock, so let’s just get this out of our system: Sun Studio, in Memphis, Tennessee, was originally more of a blues outfit. But blues begat rock, and it begat it right in Sun Studios in the form of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash, all of whom recorded albums here.

Aside from the founders of rock, Sun Studio also recorded albums for blues greats B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and Junior Parker. It closed for a while but then reopened in 1987, where, probably most notably, it recorded U2’s Rattle and Hum (1988).

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Studio One

It’s called “the Motown of Jamaica,” but really, it should just be called Studio One. Because Studio One is the home of reggae, and it doesn’t need the Motown qualifier.

Founded by Clement “Coxsone” Dodd (the man with the microphone) back in 1963, Studio One recorded albums for Bob Marley and the Wailers, Lee Scratch Perry, Burning Spear, and Toots and the Maytals. You’re welcome, world.

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Rolling Stones Mobile Studio

This one could get on here just for the novelty of having what’s basically a truck with a recording studio in it, but it’s actually been the site of a number of insanely good recordings. It was set up by Mick Jagger when he got sick of all the problems of using regular recording studios. They set up a studio in his home and then, so they could move it around, put a control room into this van.

We can thank the mobile studio for songs like Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” and — because it’s mobile — for the most famous live recording of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” — the one appearing on the posthumous Legend (1984). It also recorded parts of a number of Stones and Zeppelin albums, as well as Simple Minds’ 1979 debut album, Life in a Day, and live performances by Patti Smith and the Ramones.

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Capitol Studios

The home of Capitol Records, Capitol Studios gets on this list for the sheer breadth of the artists they’ve recorded here. All major record labels are going to have crazy amounts of awesome musical artists recording in their studios, but Capitol Records is best known for its “echo chambers,” which are part of an underground concrete bunker designed by legendary guitarist and sound engineer Les Paul to get a better reverb sound.

The studios are most famous for being the place where Frank Sinatra did a lot of his recordings — his microphone is still here, and the band Bastille recently recorded on it — as well as being a home to Nat King Cole and the Beach Boys. But it wasn’t just older music: Oasis, Daft Punk, Aaliyah, Outkast, and fun. have all recorded here.

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Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark

Easily the most fascinating studio on this list is Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark Studio in Kingston, Jamaica. While not quite as mainstream, and definitely more low-tech than nearby Studio One, the Black Ark was known for Perry’s innovative producing techniques, and also for his incredibly strange behavior. He was known for blowing ganja smoke into the tape decks, burying tapes, and spraying the unprotected tapes with blood, urine, and whiskey to “bless” them. Eventually, after a few rough years of being extorted by gangsters, Perry covered the entire building in magic-marker drawings and then burned it to the ground to get rid of ‘bad spirits.’ Other than producing many of Perry’s own records (and basically inventing the ‘dub’ genre), Black Ark gave us recordings from Bob Marley, Paul McCartney and Wings, the Clash, and Junior Murvin.

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Hans Zimmer’s Music Lair

You may not have heard of Hans Zimmer, but you’ve definitely listened to him. Zimmer is the German composer known for writing the scores to movies like Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Inception, and The Lion King. I’ve always been a fan of his music — try listening to The Dark Knight when you’re trying to get some work done, it’s second only to Daft Punk’s Alive — but I never knew he had an awesome pad like this. It looks like what I imagined Hogwarts looking like. Yes, those are skull lamps, and those aren’t bookshelves in the back — that’s a synthesizer.

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Chase Park Transduction

Athens, Georgia, has become synonymous with awesome music, and one of its most prolific studios is Chase Park Transduction. It’s recorded the granddaddy of Athens rock bands, REM, as well as acts like Bright Eyes, Deerhunter, Animal Collective, and Queens of the Stone Age.

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Parachuting off China's Great Wall

Eventually, people are going to climb up or parachute off of pretty much every global monument. It’s already happened with the Egyptian pyramids, and recently a man in a wingsuit flew just a few feet under the extended arm of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio.

We now have another entry into the genre, with this guy, who parachuted off the Great Wall of China. It’s a short ride, but the view is spectacular, and you get to see the parachuter’s relief at not being promptly arrested upon landing.

The post Parachuting off the Great Wall of China is as awesome as you think it is appeared first on Matador Network.

10 ways to piss off your bartender

Photo: Jeremy Brooks

1. Reach out across the bar and scream your order.

The fact that you’re physically separated by a bar should be an indication that’s how it’s meant to be. A good bartender knows how to tune out the noise and read your lips.

2. Snap your fingers.

If a bartender makes eye contact, she recognizes that you’re waiting and will be with you shortly. If you go snapping your fingers, prepare to be ignored for as long as possible, and don’t expect your drink to be made with love. Rather, it may be watered down with a dash of hate.

3. Tear apart coasters, napkins, straws.

No bartender wants to pick up the mess you’ve made with your constructions of chewed-up straws and napkins and chewing gum.

4. Interrupt when we’re speaking to another customer.

If a bartender is talking to another customer, especially if he’s explaining something, be patient and keep your comments to yourself. Just like in real-life situations outside the bar, it’s rude to interrupt people when they’re speaking.

5. Ask for a happy hour when there’s no happy hour.

Some bars have happy-hour drinks and some don’t. Some have 1-for-1s and some don’t. So just because you had an amazing deal at a bar just down the street doesn’t mean we’ll be able to offer you the same. There are also set prices on drinks, so the query, “What’s the best deal you can offer me on a bottle of vodka?” just won’t cut it. Telling a bartender you deserve cheaper/free booze just makes you look like an asshole.

6. Alter your drink and then send it back.

Fair enough if you don’t want the celery in your Bloody Mary, but don’t alter your drink until it’s no longer recognizable. There’s a reason why each bar has a set of cocktails created by mixologists; they’re the people who know their stuff. If you do decide to go down this route, and you truly believe you’re an expert, you not liking the drink is your own fault, so keep your opinion to yourself.

7. Overstay your welcome.

If you’re drinking and spending money, stay as long as you like. We’ll make sure you have the best time! But if you’re here to catch up on your emails (clear indication: asking for the wifi password before even ordering anything) or read a book for hours over ONE glass of house wine, please don’t. Unless there’s no one else in the bar, be mindful that those around you are willing to spend money.

8. Don’t tip.

Chances are, if you can afford a pint of beer, you can afford a small tip to go with it, especially if the service was good. Keep in mind that the hourly rate in the service industry is often well below regular minimum wage. Tips are how bartenders make their money.

9. Treat the bartender like a psychologist.

We love chitchatting and meeting new people! But we’re not here to help you hash out your latest crisis; there’s a point at which we really stop caring. Remember, no matter how fun it looks, bartending is a job — not a hobby. It’s also stressful and fast-paced. Don’t be a needy customer who expects your bartender to be giving life advice when there are 50 other humans shouting out their drink orders.

10. Order and dash.

There’s nothing more infuriating than having someone order and dash while the drink-making is in progress. It’s fine if you’ve paid — it’s your own fault you’ve forgotten about it. But if you didn’t, it’ll be the bartender who’ll have to pay. And your drink will be costing us at least an hour of work, if not more.

The post 10 ways to piss off your bartender appeared first on Matador Network.

Things you should never tell a Brit

Photo: UK Ministry of Defence

1. “I love British accents!”

I’ll begin with my biggest bugbear. Let me just give a quick geography lesson here. Great Britain (or, rather, the United Kingdom) is made up of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. All of these countries have very distinct national characteristics and very different accents. Within these countries there are even further variances in accent. Like, huge variances. A person from Glasgow will sound absolutely nothing like a person from London.

There is no such thing as a “British accent.” Tell us instead that you like our accent, and don’t insult us by instantly letting on you know nothing about our country and culture.

2. “I can do the best British accent.”

This is a bad move for two reasons. As stated above, “British” accents don’t exist. For that very reason, your version probably isn’t very good — think Anne Hathaway in “One Day” when she somehow managed to mix a heavy Yorkshire accent with elocution-lesson English (appalling).

Also, the novelty of hearing an American bark “tea and crummmmpets!” at you like it’s the funniest thing you’ll ever hear tends not to be the funniest thing you’ll ever hear when you’ve heard it several times in one evening.

3. “Oh, you’re from London!”

Maybe your victim is in fact from London and you’re very good at guessing. But that would be like me hearing you were from America and then immediately assuming you were from New York, when actually you hail from a backwater in North Dakota.

Stick with “the UK,” “Britain,” or, if you’ve really been doing your homework, “England”/”Scotland” (or whatever else you can discern — you’ll score several points for specific counties).

4. “Oh, you’re from Europe!”

The UK is not Europe. Well, okay, technically yes it is part of Europe — but it’s also not. Not to us. We’re pretty proud of our poky little island, and we don’t tend to lump ourselves in with mainland Europe. We’re British, thank you very much, not European.

5. “Cheers, mate!”

This is very closely linked to point #2. But “cheers, mate” is, without doubt, the most irksome. Why? Because every other person we meet will invariably drop it into conversation. And we cringe. Every. Single. Time. Just…don’t do it. Rise above.

6. “My great-grandmother was British!”

It’s not that this is annoying; it’s just kind of irrelevant. One thing I noticed in the US was that you guys all seem to be very aware of your family tree; aside from being ‘Murican on the face of it, you know your roots, where your family come from, and you like talking about it.

More like this: 11 things you should never say to a Canadian

Now, much as I think this is fascinating, you must understand that in Britain we kind of don’t care about that sort of thing. Unless we are very closely descended from a family of immigrants, our cultural ties to our ancestors are generally nonexistent. No offence, but I’m just not bothered if you have some British lineage somewhere down the line — unless it turns out you’re a secret descendant of the Tudor family or something, but that is unlikely.

7. “Ohmaigaaad I could listen to you talk all day.”

Is there anything more awkward than having someone look at you with pure adoration and tell you they could listen to you forever? Not really. Our awkward British dispositions aren’t programmed to cope with the simplest of compliments, so direct and unwarranted declarations of love from strangers are just painfully cringe-inducing.

8. “Do you live in a castle?”

9.9999 times out of 10, the answer is no. Don’t bother.

9. “You drink in Britain? But you do it in a classy way, right?”

I have legitimately been asked this question, and although the girl who spoke these now infamous words is one of my best friends, I still cringe when I think about this. Here’s another nugget of cultural wisdom for you about the UK: We drink a lot. In fact, we are renowned around Europe for being disgusting, binge-drinking louts.

Save yourself the embarrassment if you’re even curious about what British drinking habits are like. FYI: We go hard, we’re disgusting, and we drink a lot of hard cider. Not classy at all.

10. “What is a crumpet?”

The trouble here, apart from the question becoming so repetitive, is that I just don’t know how to describe a crumpet. My befuddled on-the-spot answers have included “like some kind of bread with holes in it” and “kind of like a pancake but really fat and holey.”

Spare your British friend/crush/stranger from accurately describing the world’s most confusing carbohydrate, and do your research instead. And if you really want to impress us, make some yourself (recipe here), because crumpets are distressingly hard to come by in your average American supermarket.

This post was originally published at Literally, Darling and is reprinted here with permission.

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Bear unlocks door of car

WHEN I WAS a kid, all I wanted to do was visit the drive-thru safari at Six Flags Great Adventure. What would be better than wild monkeys climbing on my car? As an adult however, I realize how dangerous those kinds of experiences actually are — as well as how many monkeys must die each year from stupid people running them over.

I’m surprised that there is an attraction like this near Yellowstone National Park. I’m not sure exactly how it’s run (the website for Yellowstone Bear World isn’t totally informative, and the reviews on Yelp! are mixed), but if a bear has the ability to be right next to a car and open a door with the single clutch of its paw, maybe it should be regulated a little better? I mean, I feel like there is a reason why animals are kept at a far distance when you see them at the zoo…

Feature photo: John Drake

The post 1 obvious reason to keep your car doors locked at all times appeared first on Matador Network.