new update:

Answer: of course not.

I was a tad bit surprised yesterday when I found this advertisement on gothamist:

Unfortunately, the link was broken (In Safari. It apparently works in Explorer). Later, I found a similar advertisement on Gawker:

They’re both links to a blog devoted to A Dirty Shame. Movie blogs are not uncommon nowadays. I remember coming across this one for Garden State. But why is this blog getting so much attention in the advertisement sections of Gothamist and Gawker?

Well, it turns out that the A Dirty Shame Blog is actually part of Nick Denton’s Evil Empire. Fine Line Features and Gawker Media have teamed up to hock both Blogs and A Dirty Shame.

Amazing. Gawker has the distinction of being the very first blog that I ever despised. Followed by Gizmodo, which I only feel indifference towards (not Gizmodo’s fault. Technology boors me). Then Nick Denton came up with Wonkette, which I also never read. A Washingtonian insider’s take on politics is only relivant to a Washingtonian insider. So Wonkette is, well... useless to me. He then came up with a blog about porn (why would anybody read a blog about porn when there is so much free porn on the internet?) At some point, Denton came up with Defamer, which seems to be a Gawker for Hollywood. A Dirty Shame Blog seems to be controlled by the Defamer wing of Denton’s evil empire.

A Dirty Shame Blog is edited by someone named Remy Stern. I have no idea what connection he or she has to this city, but seems to be doing a fairly good job. The site’s tone lacks the snarky petty bullshit that makes Gawker so utterly despicable irritating . Any shortcomings the site may have don’t seem to be Stern’s fault, as he or she is dependent on the quality of the articles he or she has to link to. The various articles about Baltimore and Baltimoreans are in my opinion, misrepresentative. The general concensious of these articles seems to be that Baltimoreans are provincial rubes who aren’t really sophisticated enough to understand that John Waters is making fun of us. As we all know, we’re provincial rubes who totally understand the jokes while the rest of the world never quite gets it.

One, from the Independent, implied that Baltimore was actually a bad place until John Waters came around and taught us how to laugh at ourselves. John Waters did not invent Baltimoresque absurd self-deprecating humor. That has existed forever, we’ve been trying to top one another with absurd, horrible, hilarious Baltimore tales for decades. Waters just happens to be the master of the art form. My father was fairly talented at the art, and had never once seen a John Waters film. What I’ve never really understood is what the outside world gets out of a John Waters film. At best, they get maybe half the jokes. One of Stern’s links was to an online quiz which asked which suburban neighborhood Pecker was set. Suburb? Whatever.

Still, I’m glad to see that we temporarily have a Denton Evil Empire Blog. In a couple of weeks, A Dirty Shame Blog will disappear, Baltimore and the rest of the world will once again go our separate ways, and the world will have to wait for the next Waters film to be let in on the joke.