All stories about "Mean Week"

The bad bar experience: It happens. Maybe the bartender is having a bad day. Maybe you're having a bad day. Everyone deserves a second chance. But if, after that second chance, these bars remain prime examples of why drinking at home sounds like a great idea, it's time for karmic retribution. For the bad service, bad drinks, and horrible crowds that have kept me and others from their drink and a good time, this is their comeuppance. There's no rhyme nor reason to the choices, but rest assured: no one will be spared. Club bars, restaurant bars and Marina bars -- I'm coming after you. It's personal.

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The successful club or bar in Los Angeles knows that the right kind of buzz is a license to print money, while the wrong kind of buzz means you may be forced to let unattractive people inside in order to stay afloat. In the quest to enhance (or fabricate) the demand to get inside a venue, a club will institute the velvet rope. I admit there's a nice sense of satisfaction after being granted entrance, and if you really must see the inside of bathroom where your favorite starlet was enjoying a usable amount of cocaine, or the booth where your favorite action hero was getting a lap dance, sometimes you must suffer through a wait. Yet there are limits to everything, even in this town, especially when you throw in asshole bouncers and stupid cover charges. I've listed some of the worst door policies in Los Angeles, but feel free to add your own horror stories as well.

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How many beers have you had? Is it 6? What about the one that girl bought you? 7? Man, you've got to hit the head. But who knows what you're going to find there. The archetypally disgusting New York bar bathroom is one of the few places where you can find bladder relief, cocaine, and venereal diseases all in the same place. Avoid that itchy, burning sensation and check out this list of the grossest bar bathrooms in New York. Is this list comprehensive? Of course not. Impossible. So throw your own two-cent urinal cake into the comments or tips.

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I'm something of a salon slut. Every few months or so, I like to try a new salon for my haircuts, massages, waxes, pedicures, and all those other services necessary to keep up the good looks. All that sampling has lead me to some fantastic stylists. But for the most part, I've learned that a good 'do is hard to find. Here are few DC establishments -- some totally overrated, some just plain gross -- where you're guaranteed a bad experience. And if I've overlooked salons that deserve to be bitched about, don't be afraid to speak up in the comments or tipline.

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There's nothing worse than following the advice of a guidebook and winding up in tourist hell. Paris, like any major city destination, is available for purchase in antiseptic form, and many plastic-wrapped places continue to be promoted in the mainstream travel press. Consult this list to clear the trash from your itinerary, then fill the empty space with fresh ideas from our Paris archive.

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Thanks to blog reports about tap-dancin' Larry Craig, most Washingtonians know they can check out the bathrooms in Union Station for a good time. But plenty of scandalous liaisons begin in more "respectable" -- and hygienic -- DC establishments. Young interns and staffers quickly learn that if they don't want to be the next Monica, they'd better check for that wedding ring tan because Mr. Salt-and-Pepper also may be Mr. Wife-and-Three-Kids. His ego has ballooned during his time in Washington, and, if you're friendly, he just might have the cojones to invite you back to his Capitol Hill digs or to a local hotel room. Ew. If puffy politicos aren't your bag, baby, be on guard at the following establishments. More suggestions welcome in the comments or via tips.

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Yes, Park Slope has a crapload of strollers -- old news, I know. Most of us Brooklynites are well aware that the infestation of Bugaboos and lactating breasts on 5th, 6th, and 7th avenues has reached terrifying proportions. But I swear it's getting exponentially worse as Slope parents become increasingly obsessed with their precocious, organically reared offspring and their courtesy for others dwindles. Now I'm not down on procreation or anything. But ever since I walked out of Tea Lounge with a partly chewed Cheerio stuck on my pants I've felt the need to map the ever-expanding stroller invasion to help those of us still rugrat-free to effectively skirt the dreaded MacLaren shin bruise.

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Vee haff vays off driving you mad. Germany isn't the birthplace of the word "bureaucracy." That honor belongs to France, where the B-word first appeared just prior to the French Revolution -- resulting in the Terror. But by that time, the Huns had already raised the weaving of red tape to a high art, so much so that in 1764 the very German Baron von Grimm could complain, "We are obsessed by the idea of regulation, and ... refuse to understand that there is an infinity of things in a great state with which a government should not concern itself." But each of Berlin's many governments, monarchist, fascist, and socialist, has never ceased concerning itself with this "infinity of things."

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From the mailbag: "Remember seven or eight years ago when you moved back from Los Angeles to New York, had brunch at 12:30 at Kate's joint and then went back to the Library where you just were only eight hours prior and got all-day-drunk and your best friend just got a job at this bar called pianos that was supposed to be opening soon and your unknown band just played a really rad show with this other unknown band called the Strokes and the Lower East Side was the only place where shit made sense before everything stopped making sense completely? The corner of Frankford and Girard in Philadelphia is like that now. And just as sure as you'll find a pair Buddy Holly glasses on a hipster's nose, in a few years it's going to be full of douches and feel like a fucking yuppie mardi gras. If gentrification trajectory has taught us anything it's that rad times fade, so if you're in Philly, check out this spot before you look to your left and in the proxy of a friendly Buddy-Holly-glassed kid you see some former sorostitute drinking away the pain of her reconstructive surgery." Check out more Mean Week.

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Too often, restaurant reviews focus on the trifling aspects of a meal, such as presentation and ambiance, and omit the vital facts, like whether the food will cause you to shit yourself. Knowing if the restaurant has received a health code violation may give you some insight into whether eating there will make you ill, but restaurants that pass inspection still can serve up a bad meal. All of the venues listed herein have made me sick -- not to be confused with establishments where I have made myself sick (there's a big difference). Soiled yourself because of bad food at a DC restaurant recently? Share your pain (though not your emissions) in the comments or tips.

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In the storied chronicles of New York pizza, most focus on the high drama of Lombardi's and Patsy's and Grimaldi's and other nobles. But there is another world. This world celebrates by-the-slice culture while churning out some of the worst offenses against human eatables the world has ever seen. Yes, New York has the best pizza on the planet, and it also suffers the highest concentrations of bad pizza in the cosmos. To list every crap pizza parlor in town would be like counting grains of sand on a beach swamped with canned tomato sauce. But we can at least focus on the well-known story of Ray's Pizza in all its Shiva-like incarnations, which unsurprisingly contains very little good pizza, and surprisingly contains not one actual Ray. However, it does contain heroin!

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Any way you cut it, there are a lot of crappy sludge-making coffeehouses here. Like most who have inhabited or at least visited Park Slope, I've been run down by strollers, glanced at disapprovingly by parents when I curse, and disappointed by overpriced stoop sales. What I probably do not share with most of you readers is that I was a Park Slope after-school nanny for 2+ years. Tack on three other jobs in Manhattan and the Bronx, and the living/working combo in Park Slope predictably resulted in many cups of coffee from neighborhood establishments. Perhaps I was unlucky in hitting up most in the midafternoon, rather than at prime coffee time in the morning, but a good coffee place should be able to deliver throughout the day. Bad cups of coffee were the least of my worries then, but now that I'm no longer a sleep-deprived domestic laborer, I can bitch about each and every one.

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While every bar in Los Angeles by necessity receives some of its business from unemployed industry douchebags, some bars really stand out from the crowd in terms of attracting the city's most irritating denizens. You know the type: He's been on unemployment for the past six months, but now things are "really starting to come together," like he's going to start his own agency with none of this bullshit, and he's also finally going to get SAG, and his buddy has this idea for a script that's guaranteed to sell, and when it does he's, like, totally going to produce it. People in this town are pros at taking their loserness to the next level -- just as you're thinking you wouldn't go home to this guy's studio apartment in Sherman Oaks for a million dollars, his head is rotating 340 degrees looking for someone hotter to talk to (you know, because he's such a desirable commodity himself). Spare yourself the indignity and avoid the following vortexes of LA nightlife.

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From the mailbag, re: Washington's Worst Bouncers, and specifically the bouncers at JR's:

i'm the manager here at jrs. and i think your criticism of us is just a wee bit unfair. unlike most straight bar/clubs, gay bars especially, jrs caters to pretty decent people who behave themselves without the need for thuggish babysitters. what we do need is someone to check IDs at the door, so all of our employees have two nights a month where they sit at the door and do just so. instead of having some huge gigantic (scary) asshole at the door, we have members of our staff who the customers know and enjoy talking to ... a nice greeting at the door is far more welcoming than the alternative. as for "illiterate twinks" ... you've obviously never been to our bar. please feel free to come and visit anytime.

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Certainties are not always reassuring. Yet if one can rest assured knowing that foreigners are, if anything, barely tolerated in Berlin, then one has already prepared for a principal aspect of visiting Berlin. As good old Benny said: Failure to prepare is preparing to fail -- especially if you've a temper. Preparation can simply mean expecting the occasional offensive remark, e.g. "Why don't you go back to where you came from?" The problem is that the modern-day metaphorical Nazi comes in all shapes and one brain size. Even the punks are not cleared of this unfortunate mentality, so don't be surprised if you encounter some dirty-green mohawk raving about Jews and Zionist pigs. So much for anti-establishment. Unlike the famed Soup Nazi, who is anything but, the following proprietors and servers specialize in a disturbingly fascist mindset.

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Standing in line behind the rope, making sure your group's ratio of girls to guys will get you in the door, and feeling protruding limbs against your ass all night: My kind of party! Actually, I have never felt more violated or unsexy than after a night of trying to catch up on what the kids are listening to at a DC nightclub. Just because 50 Cent is talking about grinding up against my curves does not mean that I want your 40-year-old hairy chest anywhere near me or my pheromones. They are not for you. Go away. Anyway, here are the worst possible places to spend a weekend evening if you have some semblance of a working nervous system.

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