Buzz

Forget Silicon Valley. There are loads of other cities throughout the U.S. that have a promising tech scene. 

That's according to Fast Company, which says Baltimore is of "15 Tech Scenes in Places You'd Never Think to Look."

Phoenix, Charleston, S.C., Salt Lake City and Cleveland are some of the other towns on its list. 

"Baltimore has a startup market pumped full of youthful energy," Fast Company writes. "These burgeoning entrepreneurs can tap into a slew of resources, such as Accelerate Baltimore, a business accelerator, and Innovate Maryland, which forges partnerships between schools and tech companies."

You can read more about Baltimore's tech scene here. 

The photo includes a picture of Baltimore Sun Tech Reporter Gus Sentementes, who was featured last month in Fast Company for creating a home renovation app. 

Baltimore's Sailabration brought the Today Show's Al Roker to the Inner Harbor, 1 million tourists, the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels and dozens of tall ships.

Joining the festivities to commemorate the 200-year-anniversary of the War of 1812 was the U.S. Coast Guard sailing vessel Eagle. 

"The war was one of the last major conflicts fought during the Age of Sail, but 200 years after it was declared, the Coast Guard uses the three-masted square-rigger to train future officers," writes the Washington Post.  "The very anachronism of sailing a square-rigger using sextants and celestial navigation at a time when armed drones and Global Positioning Systems dominate is part of Eagle’s appeal."

You can read the rest of the story here. 

Baltimore has a decent amount of green space, according to ParkScore.

The rating system for city parks analyzed 40 largest U.S. cities and used mapping technology and demographic data to determine how well each city is meeting the need for parks. 

Baltimore ranked No. 15 on its list, ahead of Phoenix, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Mo., and Long Beach, Calif. 

San Francisco, Sacramento, Calif., Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. rounded out the top five. 

Baltimore got a ParkScore of 54 out of 100 and found that approximately 10 percent of the city is dedicated to park land. You can read more of ParkScore's analysis of Baltimore parks here. To see the whole ranking, click here. 

Ten years after HBO first aired The Wire, Funnyordie.com brings us The Wire: The Musical. This musical parody turns the gritty show about inner-city Baltimore into a laugh-inducing musical.  

The voice over boasts, “Experience The Wire’s realistic portrayal of America’s decaying inner cities through the magic of song.”
 
The Wire: The Musical brings back many actors from the series including Michael Kenneth Williams, Sonja Sohn, Andre Royo, Larry Gillard Jr. and Felicia “Snoop” Pearson. The video has gone viral with more than 400,000 views.

Lesbian and gay singles living in Baltimore need look no further than their own home city to find their mate.
 
Baltimore ranked second in a poll conducted by Chemistry.com of cities with the most lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender singles looking for marriage and kids, beating out cities better known for their LGBT populations like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.
 
Richmond, Va. tops the list in first place. Los Angeles, Rochester, N.Y., and Harford, Conn., round out the top five.

You can see the rest of the list here. 

Broadway World describes the latest Everyman Theatre play a "hit in every way."

The last play of the season, "You Can't Take It With You," is a Pulitzer-Prize winning play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. It tells the story of a "bohemian household where fireworks are made in the basement, one daughter (Essie) dances in her tutu all over the house taught by her Russian ballet teacher Kohlenkov (the magnificent Nelson)," Broadway World writes.

The play runs through June 17 and is the last show Vincent Lancisi is directing at the theaters spot in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. It moves to downtown Baltimore's west side spring of 2013.

Broadway World praises the detailed period set and the all-star cast. You can read the entire review here. 

The June 6 opening of Maryland Live at Arundel Mills mall got plenty of attention in local newspapers and TV outlets. 

It also caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which found the 4,750-slot machine venue unusual for its being on the site of a suburban shopping mall.

"Malls have become popular additions to casino complexes in Atlantic City and Las Vegas ever since Simon Property Group, which owns Arundel Mills, opened The Forum Shops as an extension to Caesars Palace on the Last Vegas Strip in 1992," the Journal writes in the article. 

The opening of Maryland's third slots parlor was marked by traffic backups on Interstate 295, celebrity-chef Bobby Flay -- on hand for Bobby's Burger Palace -- and feuding between executives in Anne Arundel and Prince George's Counties amid talks of a casino at National Harbor.

We thought the drug-and-corruption laden city portrayed in the Wire was the only image New Yorkers had of Baltimore.

But that might change. The New York Times recently published a list of the top cities with the most college graduates and the ranking places Baltimore/Towson No. 13. Our neighbor Washington, D.C., topped the list. San Jose, Calif., Bridgeport, Conn., San Francisco and Madison, Wis., rounded out the top five. 

The Times analyzed data from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program to come up with the list. It also ran a companion article that says that cities that don't retain college graduates will be left behind. 

"A small number of metro areas vacuum up a large number of college graduates, and the rest struggle to keep those they have," the article states.

Baltimore, can you hear the sucking sound? 

Open Walls, the innovative mural art project in Station North, is getting more love. 

This time it's from the Huffington Post, which recently featured several photos of the murals and interviews with organizers, including street artist Gaia.

"From March to May the neighborhoods of Station North and Greenmount West have played host to internationally known Street Art names of the moment like Vhils, Sten and Lex, Swoon, Jaz, MOMO, and Interesni Kazki getting up on walls alongside a list of local and regional talents," the Huffington Post writes. 

The director of Hairspray and Pink Flamingos apparently enjoys hitchhiking and is now making his way across the country, according to Baltimore Fishbowl. 

John Waters "has hitched halfway across the country over the past week — yes, he started out in Baltimore — and, last we heard, is currently somewhere in Colorado," Fishbowl writes.

The movie director camped out in an indie rock band's van in Ohio, according to DCist. The blog cites live Tweets from band members of Here We Go Magic. 

Then a middle-aged couple drove him through Kansas. 

"We suspect that Waters’s Kansas hosts may have been less hip to his work than the indie band was, but they still knew they had a national treasure in the car," Fishbowl writes.

You can read the rest of the story here. 

Baltimore independent filmmaker Matt Porterfield has had another honor bestowed upon him. 

The Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University has selected the Putty Hill director for its 2012-2013 Artist Residency Awards.

"The Artist Residency Award program offers significant resources for innovators across all creative disciplines, selected each year by the center’s curators and director," Broadway World writes. "These unique residencies include considerable financial resources, along with the technical, intellectual, and staff support, along with (mental and physical) space in which to develop new work and engage with Ohio State classes and the Columbus community."

Porterfield and the three other selected artists/organizations will receive $200,000.

He plans to use the resources to work on another film, Broadway World writes. 

Porterfield has also won the Sonheim Prize and was included in the Whitney Biennial. 

 A number of cities, including Baltimore, are planning events commemorating the 200-year anniversary of the War of 1812.

The celebrations are featured in an AP story that the Wall Street Journal ran this month.

"The War of 1812 inspired Francis Scott Key to write The Star-Spangled Banner after soldiers at Fort McHenry in Baltimore raised an American flag to mark a victory over the British on Sept. 14, 1814," the Journal writes.

It goes on to note that the original manuscript for the song will be part of a War of 1812 exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society. You can read the rest of the story here.

Meanwhile, the New York Times wrote its own piece on the festivities.

"In Baltimore, as part of a festival from June 13 through June 19 known as the Star-Spangled Sailabration, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will debut a new composition inspired by the conflict," the Times writes. "And 20 tall ships and schooners, many modeled on period vessels, will drop anchor in the harbor for tours."

You can read the rest of the story here.

Baltimore is catching onto the fact that the Station North Arts and Entertainment District is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. We at Bmore Media documented a number of favorable developments in this article by Cassie Paton.

Now the Washington Post has even caught onto the charms of the neighborhood that features the Charles Theatre and the Windup Space. The paper even went as far as dubbing Station North an "it" neighborhood.

It cites Open Walls Baltimore, a mural project led by artist Gaia, as the element that is making the neighborhood a real scene for emerging artists and hipsters.

"Charm City is an especially fertile ground for street art, considering its multitude of abandoned buildings, its quirky character, and its generally permissive attitude toward street art, which some cities treat as destruction of property," the Post writes.

You can read the story and the accompanying slideshow here.

Sending your kid to Johns Hopkins University will set you back $55,742 a year in room, board, fees and tuition.

That makes the Charles Village school the 7th most expensive university in the country, according to Business Insider. Sarah Lawrence College, New York University and Columbia University are the three most expensive colleges. You can see the complete ranking here.

Forbes says Baltimore is the nation's 5th best city for tech jobs, citing growth in federal spending and STEM.

The magazine didn't even lump the city in with Washington/Maryland/Virginia, which was ranked No. 2 for job growth. No. 1 was Seattle and No. 3 was San Diego.

Forbes took a look at employment growth across a variety of sectors associated with the high-tech economy, including software, Internet publishing, engineering and math-related fields.

You can see the complete list here.