Looking over the poll results for Southern Living's "The South's Tastiest Towns Awards," I see we placed ninth overall, behind Lafayette, Louisville, New Orleans, Charleston, Charlottesville, Houston, Birmingham, and Decatur. I also notice that some readers are questioning whether we even qualify.

From the comments...

How is Baltimore a SOUTHERN town?

I never did understand how they thought of us living in Maryland as living in the south... It is exactly northeast...

... definitely NOT the South.

It's true that Baltimore often doesn't feel like the South, and we tend to get lumped in with the likes of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other Rust Belt/AFC North cities. For years, I wrote for the Oxford American magazine (which considers itself "The Southern Magazine of Good Writing"), and they rebuffed any Baltimorecentric story ideas, because our city...

Actor James Franco visited Hopkins Friday afternoon to introduce a film he made about the modernist American poet Hart Crane and participate in a question and answer session with Hopkins professor and noted Hart Crane scholar, John Irwin. 

My colleague, Jess Blumberg, and I attended, and I wanted to jot down my impressions of the event before it recedes too far into memory. Jess will present her take on things in the April issue's "Charm City Chatter" column—so be on the look out for that! 

We filed into Shriver Hall, which was packed with students (predominantly girls), past tables out front promoting professor Irwin's new book on Crane, Hart Crane's Poetry: "Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio". 

Professor Irwin didn't seem at all irked to have to share the stage with a 30-something actor,...

James Franco will be at Johns Hopkins University Friday afternoon. The actor/Renaissance man will attend a screening of The Broken Tower, a black-and-white film about writer Hart Crane that he starred in, directed, produced, and edited. He wrote the screenplay while still a student at NYU's Tisch School for the Arts. The film was shown at 2011's Los Angeles Film Festival, and it's expected to have a theatrical release later this year. Friday's screening is scheduled for 2 pm at Shriver Hall and will include a panel discussion with John Irwin, author of Hart Crane’s Poetry, which was recently published by Hopkins Press.

I was just saying to a colleague that we need to stop blogging so much about The Wire. Don't get me wrong, I lurve The Wire. I watched its entire five-season run in about a week a few years ago and then wouldn't shut up about it for about a month afterwards. But, it has been off the air for four years now, maybe its time we move on? 

But that becomes difficult when the show's reputation keeps growing and more and more people keep discovering the Dickensian detail David Simon and his cohorts brought to the show's portrait of Baltimore.

Ironically, the show was never very popular when it was on, but since it ended it's received a steady stream of high-profile notices in the press. The latest comes courtesy of none other than President Obama, who told ESPN's Bill Simmons this week that Omar Little—the gay, shotgun-weilding, ghetto rogue played by Michael K. Williams—has "got to be" the show's best character.

If you've seen the show, it's hard to argue with that assessment. As my coworker, Jess Blumberg, has said: "...