Day Drinking on Delmarva

This week Todd talks about his beefcake shoot for a plumbing company. It is absolutely spectacular. Tony talks about Patty Cannon Estates, which is way less spectacular.

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This week, we talk reality TV in Bethany Beach and the attitudinal importance of New Year’s Resolutions.

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Todd talks about the new Starboard Christmas Card and Tony reveals the secret to buying gifts for children. SPOILER: They’ll never remember.

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Todd celebrates his neighbor’s lights and Tony introduces his Bagel Manifesto.

Our sponsor this week is the Mountain Maryland Mamas podcast, a podcast that is mostly the mirror image of ours. Covering the Deep Creek and Garrett County area, they do for the mountain resort what we do for the beach. Kind of. I mean, they’re nicer than me, but they seem to have Todd’s enthusiasm for their area.

I listened to their most recent episode celebrating the mountains at Xmas. If you have an affinity for the region, check out their show.

We kind of forced them to be our sponsor because they reached out to us about our Deep Creek Lake episode, so this isn’t a paid promotion or anything like that. We just like what they’re doing and think you might, too.

Speaking of things you might like, after years of threatening, I’ve begun producing my Bagel Manifesto. The trailer is here if you’d like to check it out.

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Tony isn't a regular Facebook participant. This week he remembered why after accidentally baiting some trolls.

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Berlin does Halloween as well as Delmar does it poorly. In this episode, we try and figure out why.

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Punk in the time of Covid, the Delmar Police strike a deal, and we're happy to welcome GCFL Productions as a new sponsor.

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This week we get a little derailed by talking about the "Best Of" promotions that drive us a little nuts. Plus, Todd goes to a party and Tony stays home for the Frostburg Indie Lit fest.

No matter how hard we try (and I think Todd made a better effort than I did this week) whenever the topic of “Best Of” issues of local magazines come up, there’s a little ranting that follows.

From my perspective, it’s mostly jealousy. I don’t have the courage to take people’s money to make them feel more important. As Todd points out, there’s a little more to in than that, but there are some clubs that don’t provide the return on investment that we think they do.

For example, while I’ve never paid to participate in a “Best Of” event, I did join the Nonfiction Author’s Association. I figured that, as an author of nonfiction it was a club I should be in.

They have benefits, such as reduced prices to submit your book for awards and discounts for attending different conferences and classes.

Almost immediately I discovered that, while nonfiction authors include everything from poetry to how-to manuals, the bulk of the membership were people who go on speaking tours. Self-Help, management, and how to change your life in 30 days aren’t not nonfiction, but I realized pretty quickly that the time and money it cost wasn’t fun or rewarding.

To put it in management speak, the ROI just isn’t there.

I didn’t even submit my book (on sale here!) to “win” an award, mostly because there wasn’t a true crime category (or a journalism category). When I pointed this out, they offered to add one, but I thought it would be more productive for sales to set my $200 on fire.

I mean, how proud could I be of an award that would have been the first in a category they created just to justify cashing my check?

Urg.

Anyway, that’s what I wonder about companies who pay to appear in advertorial magazines and websites (although I have written for both). Beyond the advertising aspect (such as it is) there is also this clubby aspect, like being in the chamber of commerce. It’s a networking opportunity as much as a promotional one, but at what point is it just too much to justify?

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In this episode, we break the story about a local bartender becoming a finalist in a national competition, the problem with poetry (again) and whether spies are listening to our show.

Todd and I tried out a couple of different places in Berlin to record the show. This was a million years ago and nobody knew what podcasts were. As a result, people were just confused by the fact that we were sitting there with microphones.

We told them it was an internet radio show, and that seemed to slake their eminently quenchable curiosity. Sometimes it would have been more satisfying if people just walked up to us and said, “I just want to let you know I see that you have microphones there.”

Anyway, during those halcyon days I started distinguishing between craft beers with non-traditional taste words. These included “pointy,” “green,” and “beer-flavored.” It was 60 percent me trying to de-mystify beer tasting words and 40 percent me being a jerk.

“Beer flavored beer” kind of stuck, though, because it is obvious and pretty dumb. It’s the kind of easy turn of phrase that thousands of people make all the time, but I had never had heard it anyplace else until Tito’s started its “Vodka Flavored Vodka” promotion.

Their motivations were similar to mine. At some point, you want to be able to just drink your damn drink without trying to remember whether you’re allergic to hyacinths or whatever adulterations brewers add to make their beer or spirits (all distillers are brewers).

It stung a little bit to hear it as a national ad, even though I knew the amount of creativity to make that connection was practically zero. I’m not a professional wit, and if I were I wouldn’t think beer flavored beer was any cleverer than vodka flavored vodka.

It’s a stupid, easy joke that anyone could come up with.

Then Woodbridge wines stole another part of our show for an ad campaign and I started getting suspicious.

Our tagline has been (for a couple of years) “At the beach, Happy Hour’s whenever you say it is.”

Woodbridge Wines debuted its new tagline:

The weekend starts whenever you say it does.

So while it is possible that they pay ad companies thousands of dollars to come up with the same kind of blather Todd and I say because we think it’s goofy, it’s time to start wondering whether the top ad companies monitor our show for brilliance.

So if you’re out there evil ad people, Drink What You Like and Be Happy!

In this week’s episode, Todd DeHart t

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Labor Day at the beach is radically different from Labor Day elsewhere for lots of reasons. The first being the pressure comes off in the service industry. And this year, they needed it.

When I was a kid (and I’m sure they still do something like it on the Jersey Shore) some towns would hold what could be called “Farewell Benny” parties. “Benny” is one of my favorite pejoratives. It stands for Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark, New York, the places day-trippers and summer people tended to come from.

Here on the Delmarva Penninsula they call them Tourons, which exudes the exquisite lack of creativity we embrace in the region. It doesn’t just lack tact but it is also reeks of morning radio fart humor.

So, no. I’m not a fan.

I proffered my own alternative, Pawsome, which stands for “Pennsylvania, somewhere” as a more elegant replacement. It hasn’t really caught on.

Todd DeHart offered a particular insight this week about the tenor of Labor Day and indeed Summer 2021. As a person who works in a tourism-adjacent industry, Todd hangs out with a lot of food service people.

In a typical year, Labor Day is kind of a launching pad with people excited for the coming weeks of fair weather, easily accessible beaches, and tourists mostly crowding the weekends. This year, he said, Labor Day marked more relief than excitement.

We have a working idea on the show that some people misunderstand what vacation is for. They come to the beach with this notion that they have to have fun and it doesn’t matter who they have to kill to do it. It’s as if they have a weird checklist left over from when they came here in the eighth grade and they’re trying to recreate that experience.

Sometimes for generations.

According to Todd (I went nowhere near the beach this summer), it was amplified this year. Added to the checklist people were those suffering from pandemic mania, desperate to blow off steam they felt they’d accumulated watching Netflix for a year. People were meaner and cheaper and generally committed to taking the fun out of summer to prove they had a good time.

A lot of the folks who make their livings from tourism have an Apollo Creed demeanor. Sure they won the fight, but they don’t wanna celebrate or ever do it again. Maybe it has to do with the expectation that this would be a celebratory summer rather than a desperate, grasping validation that the months spent inside were worth it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daydrinkingondelmarva.substack.com