According to Danger Noodle Law 34b.247 in the City of Pittsburgh ...
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According to Danger Noodle Law 34b.247 in the City of Pittsburgh ...
The great Heinz ketchup debate has been settled. But also not.
And we’re back!
Back from where? Back from being confused about days of the week because we had a national holiday with the audacity to fall on a Tuesday, therefore, Wednesday felt like Monday and by the time I realized it was actually Wednesday, I was like, “Eh. It’s summer. Let freedom ring all up in this mountain majesty bitch, and just skip a week of the newsletter.”
Wow, the band name came EARLY this week. Mountain Majesty Bitch at your service. We are obviously an all-girl punk band.
Now, right away, I’m going to hit you with some emotions in this edition, but then we will get to the good Burghy stuff, and there’s a lot of that! Normally I would give you permission to bloop-bloop past something like this first one, but I expressly forbid it in this instance. Do not bl— HEY! I saw that. Do not bloop-bloop, you jags.
1. Emotions? Ugh. Gross.
I think that is an actual line in my book. Wait. Let me see…
Close!
I wish I could find the words to express to you my new state of existence since my book published. I’ve told you that I’m in therapy to re-learn how to recognize my own emotions since I’ve spent so many years protecting myself by becoming an emotionless robot, but this right here? I recognize this one again, and I told my therapist as much yesterday. This is relief. Relief after seven years of fear. Seven years after I said I was quitting my That’s Church blog and quitting my magazine column so that I could focus on writing novels. Seven years after I dared to voice my goal out into the world knowing that I was in essence throwing the dream up into the wind and then allowing the pressure of expectation to fall down upon my shoulders. The pressure to publish a book. Then when a publisher said, “Yes, we will publish your book,” I replaced the old fear with a new fear—that I didn’t write a good book. Because what is life if it is not lived in fear? That was how I used to think.
Every author thinks their book is the shit* and when I finished my book and was putting it out into the world, I said, “My book is the shit,” but underneath that seemingly confident sentence was this lurking, shadowy fear that maybe my book sucked and I would be revealed to be nothing more that a blogger who thought she wrote something. The wild thing about fear and expectation and uncertainty is that sometimes we don’t even recognize their weight. They’re these ghosts whose shapes are familiar enough, but you can’t pull them out of the fog to identify them. They hold you down just enough so that you’re aware there is a presence, but you don’t sense that there is also a weight. Like a hand that has rested on you too long until you don’t realize it’s constantly there until it’s gone and you suddenly feel gravity is just a little less burdensome. Your step and your load become a little lighter.
It took me three weeks, but I finally opened my book. I mean really opened it and looked inside. Direct, lengthy eye contact. Read some of the pages. The passages I loved. Allowed myself to believe what people are telling me. That yes, I did it. Wrote the damn thing. Take it out of that box in your closet, girl, and put that shit on your bookshelf in your bedroom. Line them up. Look at their spines. Your name on them. Allow yourself to feel proud for fucking once.
So I did. I do. I will.
No matter what, everything from here on out is the french fries on top. I wrote a book. It’s beautiful. It’s moving. It will still be here on a shelf one day when I’m not. My children will always have my words to pull down from their own shelves, and when they’re done looking at it, I hope they’ll tuck it back up there and look at the spine with pride in me. They saw it happen. They watched a dream realized change me for the better, and then maybe they’ll keep reaching for their own dreams.
Dreaming dreams isn’t a meaningless cliche despite our culture’s best attempts to dilute it to nothing more than the equivalent of silly rainbow unicorn poop. Reaching for dreams isn’t just the thematic backdrop of Olympic theme songs. Realizing dreams is an available reality. I hope that everyone who one day throws their own dreams up into the air on their voice only to feel the weight returned will recognize it as a joy to carry. Carrying it means you’re operating with intention, striving for something bigger—striving to feel the rushing sense of pride when you get to throw that weight off and say, “There. Yes, I did it.”
If I could do it all again, I would let myself find joy in the burden.
Go speak the name of your dreams up and out, and then go chase them into the air. Mountain Majesty Bitch has spoken and that is a direct order.
My next dream (including maybe publishing another novel) that I’ll throw into the air on my voice is to finish my Master’s in History and then get my Ph.D.
And you better believe if I succeed, my desk nameplate will read “Dr. Mountain Majesty Bitch.”
No, wait. I mean, “Dr. Mrs. Mountain Majesty Bitch Jagr.”**
*Boomers, last I checked, “the shit” meant “good,” but I am old and it is possible that “the shit” means “bad” again. Check TikTok for the latest definition of “the shit.” I mean it the good way.
** Jaromir, call me … on a landline like it’s 1992. I will teach you to dance better because, my brother in hockey mullet, what are you even doing?
2. Is that a python in your backyard or are you just happy to see me?
With that out of the way, let’s talk about danger noodles. Sneks. Nope ropes.
As you might have guessed, my snake-loving teen daughter has taught me some fun ways to refer to snakes because before I just called them AAAAAHHHHHHNOOOs. If, like me, you hate snakes, then have I got a nightmare for you! Please be warned that the nightmare only gets worse as the headline progresses.
Like, where do you even start screaming? After “python”? “Released by owner?” “REMAIN AT LARGE?” Or do you just start screaming immediately and scream progressively louder until you get to the end of the headline and your head explodes?
Apparently a local man who could no longer afford to feed his pet squeezy nope ropes just went and released them into the wild, and by “wild” I mean, maybe your backyard.
The man who released the python between the municipal building off McKnight Road also released a 7-foot-long rat snake, which is native to Pennsylvania; a 7-foot bredli python; and two juvenile ball pythons that are each about 1.5 feet long, the lieutenant said.
That’s right. There is a SEVEN FUCKING FOOT PYTHON out there and I’m sure you’ll excuse my language but when can we scream FUCK if not when there is a 7-foot python somewhere out there waiting to nope-rope us to death?
Police still are trying determine what, if any, charges could be filed in connection with releasing snakes since pythons could pose a danger to people.
Yeah, excuse me, but what do you mean by “what, if any, charges”?
We already had the alligator problem and now we have a 7-foot nope rope disturbing our peace. Surely this is against the law? Some law? Have you checked the books for, like, “Danger Noodle Law”?
Also, yinzers, if you can’t afford to feed your snakes, rather than release them out into our streets, I have a suggestion. Have you tried feeding them pigeons? They’re all over the place, fat as hell and free for the taking.
Don’t email me, PETA. It’s the circle of life.
3. Ketchup wars and not the kind you think
Somewhere in Mar-a-Lago (BOOM! Politics!) there is a bottle of ketchup. The bottle of ketchup is used to place a dollop on the gilded edge plate upon which Donald Trump’s well-done steak will be centered so that he has something splattery to throw at the wall when he gets upset.
The question, friends, is this: where is the bottle of ketchup when not in use? Where is your bottle of ketchup? Is it in your fridge? Or in your pantry or other cupboard kept at room temperature?
This is definitely one of those debates where everyone thinks they’re right because no one realized there were people who did it differently. Fridge people are like, “You’re gonna get botulism,” while room-temperature people are like, “Show me on the bottle where it says ‘refrigerate after opening.’”
And those room-temperature people? They have a point. When I was in my twenties, a co-worker was shocked to hear I kept my ketchup in the fridge and I remember her words exactly: “Why would you put cold ketchup on hot food? Nowhere on the bottle does it say to refrigerate it after opening.” She then went to the office kitchen to retrieve the Heinz bottle and prove it to me. I was stunned. It wasn’t on there. Anywhere. These days, the bottles do say, “For best results, refrigerate after opening,” but that is a far cry from, “If you don’t want to die painfully while puking like a demon got a hold of ya, refrigerate after opening.”
To this day, my ketchup is in my fridge. Yours might not be. Recently Heinz UK stepped into the debate ring to try to settle the argument once and for all after they polled their Twitter followers and found the results were pretty evenly divided.
This might surprise you in this time of unity and brotherhood, but their decree did not settle the debate at all. So keep your ketchup wherever you please, but I get the feeling it will make a cooler spatter pattern and drip more dramatically down your wallpaper if you keep it at room temperature.
Now, would you believe my parents kept peanut butter in the fridge and I thought that was where it should be well into adulthood, so as a young mom I was basically trying to spread peanut flavored rocks on soft bread, tearing it to shreds, until one day someone was like, “Are you a psychopath?”
Excuse me. That’s Mrs. Psychopath Jagr to you.
4. Kennywood’s redemption season
I wanted to let you all know I visited Kennywood for the first time in several years. At my last visits, I found the park depressing, to be honest. The place was looking so run down and sad. Dirty. The rides weren’t operating with any regularity while game and food/drink booths were often closed and unstaffed. It just wasn’t worth the money to be reminded that what used to be, no longer was.
My daughter asked to go this year, so I took her on a Friday expecting it to be in worse shape, but now for more money. Yinzers, I was so very pleasantly surprised!
They really redeemed themselves with their current 125th year celebration. Everything is clean, updated or refurbished. I’m talking immaculate. Not a spot of litter anywhere. The tunnel that used to feel like you were walking through a toilet pipe is now a sensory delight. The games were open, nearly every food booth staffed, visible security all through the park, and I only saw one ride not in operation—The Black Widow, which is so temperamental they really need to just replace it, preferably with a contained ride like The Exterminator. Everything from the benches to the parking lot row number signs to the fences have been refurbished or replaced. The new Spinvasion ride is so fun. My daughter said, “It’s like the Swings, but more violent.” Accurate. We also both decided the returned and refurbished Kangaroo ride is “more bouncy,” but it is a bit shorter of a ride than it used to be, likely to manage the line length.
We had a perfect time and it was so encouraging to see that the increase in ticket prices has gone directly into the park and hopefully higher wages for their employees, who were all kind. None of this is an ad. I just wanted to share that if you haven’t been there in a while because you too found it not worth it, go and see for yourself the improvements.
I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
5. New Burghy Products!
This is just going to become a regular feature from now on. Each edition I’ll feature a new Burgh-themed or Burgh-owned product that I have discovered since I’m always on the lookout in preparation for my annual holiday guide. This week, we’ve got the new partnership between the City of Pittsburgh and Commonwealth Press to create a line of official licensed city merchandise. This effort is the brainchild of my pal and former city staffer and future mayor of Pittsburgh James Hill, who might love Pittsburgh history more than me, and that’s saying something.
There are hoodies and t-shirts and drinkware and hats and more. Some of my favorite items:
Go check out the store! Not an ad! Please make a stainless steel hot/cold drink tumbler with a lid, guys.
Also, how long until knockoffs start showing up on corner tables in the Strip?
6. Have you tried just NOT bringing your gun to the airport?
If the danger noodles weren’t nightmarish enough for you, how about we talk about … airport guns!
Transportation Security Administration officers on Monday stopped a Washington County man who tried to bring a handgun onto a flight at Pittsburgh International Airport.
So you’re like, “It’s okay. It’s one gun, Michael. What could happ—”
It was the 22nd gun confiscated at the airport so far this year.
What is wrong with you psychopaths? Go home and feed pigeons to your pet pythons and stop traveling by air if you’re so gun-nutty you literally forget you have one on your person or in your carry-on bag despite knowing you’re about to be going through a security screening. Signed, all the people who carefully check their bags for bottles containing more than the danger-threshold of three-point-four ounces of liquid.
7. Random n’at
The user-created Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood themed LEGO set has reached the needed 10,000 votes to be considered for an official future LEGO product! Now we wait and see if it becomes a reality as LEGO moves through what I am sure will be a process of contacting the Fred Rogers Company to see what they can work out. I so hope this becomes a reality.
Grilled Stickies are back at Eat’n Park after a several-month disappearance due to a bakery partner closing. Eat’n Park has now partnered with a generations-old McKees Rocks bakery to bring the beloved product back, and listen, this is all well and good and if you’re a Grilled Stickies-eater, I’m happy for you but I say this to Eat’n Park with all sincerity …
Benstonium did their patriotic duty this Mountain Majesty Day and asked AI to create images of the Pittsburgh Penguins as Revolutionary War-era men and it’s pretty much the best thing ever:
Go see them all, including Letang, Fleury, Iceburgh and Kessel. And this goes without saying, but, “Jaromir, you’re quite the rum duke. Would sir like to become the admiral of my high seas?”
8. That’s all!
Have a fantastic week! Be kind! Also, there are 33 seats left for my free author talk at Cooper-Siegel Library in Fox Chapel on July 25 (I actually got the date right this time!). I’m so looking forward to this because it is my first chance to interact with readers after they’ve read the book. I can’t wait to ask YOU some questions about how you read it, when the characters became real to you (I want actual page numbers please), and if you noticed certain things I did sneakily because I’m Mountain Majesty bitchy like that. Join us! We will hug! Also, I do apologize to the people in my life who are not huggers. I try to remember who is and who isn’t, but I fail most times. If I come in for one and you don’t want it, just do what Sally Wiggin does when I forget she isn’t a hugger …
Okay, but how does Sally feel about GROUP hugs?
Group hug!