There was lots of other nice stuff, like armor and swords, and rooms from churches and mansions, and stained-glass windows and sculptures and very old paintings. Of course the subject of every pre-1700 painting was Jesus or his immediate family, which can get kind of oppressive. But what are you going to do? Go look at the Asian art, I guess.

The 20-Century collection was kind of goofy, but good paintings in any case. Picasso and Dali and whatnot. But the Contemporary Art collection was just damn funny. Let's see, they had the obligatory Warhol (something from the store pasted on something else from the store), a big photo of a mock-up of a bunch of Soviets who got slaughtered by Afghani troops (oh how sad, the poor helpless BLOOD-THIRSTY COMMIE INVADERS got snuffed by the simple mountain-folk they were trying to drag into their EMPIRE OF OPPRESSION), and a circle of rocks on the floor. Yeah, a circle of rocks on the floor. Several somebodies are laughing all the way to the bank.

After finishing up with the art, we headed downtown for more museum action. The Mütter Museum of freakish human body parts, to be specific. According to our sources, this place is a repository of polydactylic extremities, deformed skulls, and defective fetuses. Cool, eh? It took a while to find it, what with the one-way streets and all. When we finally got there we found out they wanted something like 15 bucks for admission. Since we were already nervous about leaving Graham's car on what looked like one of the most auto-thefty streets in Philadelphia, we decided to skip this one. There's always rotten.com for deformed fetuses, right?

On to our way out of town we stopped at Pat's on the south side [ed: Way, way out on the south side. It was in strange part of town where the streets had been turned into some kind of outdoor market that I've never seen the likes of. Ah, how wonderfully wonderful is the diversity of our wonderful country, or something]. The bartender at Dock Street told us it was the best place to get cheese steaks. That's certainly possible because they were pretty damn good cheese steaks. Greasy and tasty and stuff. So after we ate we drove to Baltimore.

Graham's dad lives in Baltimore, or more exactly in Ellicott City (home of the Linda Tripp trial). We were a little early so we went over to the Ellicott Mills Brewing Company. Graham and I both had pints of the obligatory märzen, and a dunkel. These total clowns came in, looked around, and ordered glasses of wine! Why do you go to a brewpub to get wine [ed: The only things worse to order in a brewpub are a white wine spritzer, Zima, or bottled water]? People baffle me.

We didn't want to have too much to drink, because we knew we were headed out to Fells Point. So after the two beers we went to Graham's dad's (hereafter to be called "Scott") house. Scott showed up in short order and gave us a tour of his new basement. Evidently it was all dirt before, so he excavated it and turned it into a furnished basement. With a hardwood floor, glass doors and a wine cellar.

We didn't hang out very long, as we were evidently due at the home of one of Scott's friends. We drove to this guy's house, where some sort of party was in progress. The adults were all out back where four taps were set up in the garage, with four different homebrews on draft! We had märzen, dunkelweizen, pilsner, and get this, cask conditioned ESB from a hand-pumped tap. Anybody who keeps his homebrew on draft is pretty damn cool to begin with, but I think having your own cask conditioned ale and beer engine launches you into the stratosphere of wicked-badness. Scott has some cool friends.

Well, Fells Point beckons. It's a very old harbor in Baltimore where they have an insane number of pubs. And they film "Homocide" there, or something. We started out at Duda's Tavern. Graham and I had these K-rad burgers with weird cheese and Scott had a mean-looking steak. We sampled some local brews at Duda's. Graham and I had pints of Clipper City Octoberfest. I also had a Lancaster Strawberry Wheat, and Graham had a DeGroen's Märzen (or as one of Scott's friends calls it, "Mother's Milk").

Next stop: Max's on Broadway. With over 100 beers on tap, this place is not to be trifled with. It's kind of like Taco Mac here in Atlanta, but with more of a dank pit atmosphere, and of course they have beers over 6% A.B.V. These chicks were supposed to be meeting us there (unbeknownst to me at the time), but they didn't show up. I mention this only because Graham is dating one of them now (I know, he lives here and she lives in Baltimore, and, oh he can explain [ed: Um, er, yeah. Her name is Tracey, and you can see pictures of her here. Actually, I'm moving in with her in about a month. So, yeah, that about explains it]). So anyway, we moseyed up to the bar and got a few pints of Red Hook Hoptoberfest. Scott and I lit up a couple of Tony Borhani Bahia Golds [ed: I don't know what this means] from the adjacent tobacconist. I think I may have had a big plate of nachos, but details are sketchy [ed: Yes, he did have a plate of nachos, for no apparent reason, since we had just eaten. I have no idea what got into him]. I do know that I had a Pyramid Draught Pale Ale (nitrogen-tap) and Graham had an Anchor Old Foghorn barleywine. I wanted one of those too, but the booze was starting to have a palpable effect [ed: as evidenced by the aforementioned nachos fiasco] and I figured I needed to pace myself, 'cause we weren't done with the pub-crawl yet.

A brisk walk found us at The Warf Rat. Very nice dank going on there, kind of salty and crusty. The Warf Rat is an outlet for one of the local breweries, so we had a lot of unique stuff to pick from. They had a hand-pump, so we all went with pints of the cask conditioned ESB. We had a mildly coherent discussion about music, focusing mainly on the Beatles and Filter [ed: Dad's take on Filter: "Too much screaming." Old people are funny]. Graham and Scott caught up on family news, and a good time was had by all.

On the way back to the car, we passed some guy playing a Prince song in a doorway. Actually, it may have been Prince himself [ed: Or maybe Freddy Prinze, Jr., teenage hearthrob and star of the hit blockbuster "She's All That and a Bag of Chips"]. That would seem about right. We made a pit stop on the way back at the Baltimore Brewing Company, where we split a pitcher of DeGroen's Märzen. And, that's about all really. Baltimore is cool.