Carried off to hell by a hundred minions of the devil
It's all fun and games until the pigeons eat your football
Currently. Somewheres about in the Pittsburgh region. There is. Snow. On the ground. On October nine. teenth. Frozen precip. itation.
The lesson to be learned here is that snow and cold and sleet on October 19 makes me forget how punctuation works^
If you’re the lucky dry ones who only saw sleet, spare a thought for those in the northern parts of the Pittsburgh region who woke up to …
Shout it into the abyss with me: HOW ABOUT NO! Let’s talk.
1. How you deauxin? dewin? doyn? d’ohw’n?
Ah, Pittsburghese. The vernacular. The accent. The unreal way in which yinzers have managed to defeat the alphabet at its own game. Git aht. Jeet jet. Dahn Iggles. You said all those correctly in your head and you know exactly how those things sound.
My sister has lived outside of Pittsburgh (California, Texas, Virginia) since she left home for college at 18, but on a recent visit home, she unknowingly demonstrated that you can take the girl out of the yinz but you can’t take the yinz out of the girl because she said, “He’s going with mom,” and I had to cut her off with a condescending bup-bup-bup.
“Bup-bup-bup. Did you hear yourself just now?”
“What?”
“You said ‘going’ like mom and dad.”
“Oh my god. Going. Gooo-iiiiing. Crap. Did I really?!”
The problem here is that there is no way to correctly spell the deep yinzer pronunciation of going in the way my parents and some other yinzers say it. For me, I don’t have much of a yinzer accent because my accent is more of the hard-to-place deaf variety, and because I worked my ass off to erase the yinzer accent from my mouth. However, when I slip into my yinzerness, it comes at as “gown” where “own” is pronounced like “own” and not “gown” and I just retyped the word gown and tried to say it doesn’t sound like gown. AHHHHHHH! This is my point! Phonetically spelling out Pittsburgh’s yinzer accent can be actually, literally impossible with the existing alphabet.
My parents, who are boomers, and many others around their age who embrace their yinzer accents or don’t otherwise feel the need to erase them, say going and doing in a very weird way. The best I can describe it is say the word “born” but remove the r. Now change the b to a hard g or a d. THAT’S how my sister said it and that’s how my parents say it and the one or two times I’ve heard myself say it, I flung myself off the Clemente in punishment. I’m an excellent swimmer.
Typing the pronunciation in a phonetic way that makes it sound the way it does in real life like we do with dahn, shahr, git, tahn, worsh? IMPOSSIBLE. But that didn’t stop the best yinzers in the world from trying to help me and what we determined is this … there’s no solution.
I think I even saw one that put five vowels next to each other in an attempt to illustrate the sound. Deouean. FIVE VOWELS. What are we French? Have you heard how we pronounce Versailles?! Anyway, no consensus was reached despite yinzers pulling out umlauts, diphthongs, and I swear I saw a tilde in there somewhere.*
The point of this entire thing? My educated, sophisticated, genteel southern CPA sister who hasn’t lived in Pittsburgh for literal decades was horrified to realize she sometimes slips into not just a basic yinzer accent, but a hardcore boomer yinzer accent that makes her sound like she shouldn’t be doing your taxes but should be front-porch sittin’ in Blawnox talkin’ to a passerby about the cost of city chicken at the Iggle and how it’s cutting into her ‘ahrn and chip-chopped ham budget.
Welcome to Pittsburgh; you can leave, but you’ll never, ever escape.
* Fun fact: my last name, which came from my ex-husband, actually has a tilde in it and an accent over the e. Montañéz. I’m very special. I’m going to start going by Vírgiñiä Montañéz just to confuse the shit out of people.
2. What in the name of Satan?!
There are birds, and then there are the minions of Beelzebub — pigeons. Winged vermin. Sky rats. Air turds.
I have long long long, and I mean for more than a decade, been telling you about how pigeons are the worst. They aren’t native to North America. No, some asshole brought them here thinking they’d be a fucking delight when what they are is a pox. A scourge. A vomit-eating curse upon our purple mountain majesties and our fruited plains.**
And for more than a decade, you all have been like, that’s cute. She’s silly. Such hyperbole. Pigeons are normal. Fine. Predictable. Just birds. Silly little nothing birds not at all scheming or plotting or fulfilling their hell-mandates.
But … behold.
And behold:
Listen to me. There is a football game going on and these pigeons are like, “Fuck you. We’re here now.” Walk up to a wren. Go ahead. A robin. A seagull. See how close you get before they fly away screaming in fright. These pigeons see dozens of large men trying to rip each other’s faces off not five feet away from them and they’re like, “For the last time, get the hell out of here, you assholes. This is ours now.”
And you’re like, Virginia, you are exaggerating. They were merely distracted by whatever delicious grass, bug, vomit, or feces brought them to the field in the first place. They are too afraid of peop—
Something is up. The pigeons are plotting. Doom is coming. They are unafraid. But go on calling me a “paranoid bird-hating hallucinating weirdo.” We’ll see who is laughing in the end when you’re being carted off to hell by the demon version of birds dressing Cinderella in her ball gown and I’m safely in my pigeon bunker eating a year’s worth of dried fruit strips.
Also, IS TOM BRADY’S HEAD SHRINKING FROM AGE AND EVIL?!
Good.
**Somewhere, Dr. New Jersey just stood at attention and saluted so hard his America broke.
3. Sky demons, senate robots. Welcome to 2022.
I think the real question we should be asking these days is what DON’T you have on your bingo cards because my bingo card basically just needs a Harbaugh brother to rip his face skin off to reveal his true lizard identity and I’m winning this whole shebang.
And yes, I did have John Fetterman being accused of being a robot by Fox News on my bingo card. You’ve got to think outside the box when you create your cards, people! Do better! You’re like, “Surely Kim Kardashian won’t be the next president of the United States.” False! Put it on your card! It could happen, and so could … all of this:
First, I have often asked, “Where exactly does the software end and the pigeon begin,” so, Tucker, I get it. We must ask the hard questions.
“Pro-murder.”
Also something I’ve said about pigeons.
“Only rich kids wear hoodies.”
This is also true about pigeons. You never see a destitute pigeon in tattoos and hoodies. It’s always the loaded ones with their dad’s Audi cruising down Smithfield that wear the hoodies.
“Pennsylvania could very well be sending a computer program to the U.S. Senate.”
Extremely normal thing to say. Not at all batshit.
But also, yes, pigeons are run on computer programs called Lucifer 6.66 and it either malfunctioned that day of the Steelers game, or we’re about to find out just what the devil ordered.
Tots and pears.
4. Will the real Mike Doyle please stand up?
This is Mike Doyle:
A Democrat. A member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing Pennsylvania districts since 1995. Climate change believer, pro-immigration, has shifted toward a more pro-choice stance in the last decade and has a 0% NRA rating. Retiring.
This is Mike Doyle:
An insurance professional and Plum Borough councilman. A Republican. Running for the first Mike Doyle’s seat in the redrawn 12th district. I would tell you his platform, but his site lists stuff about jobs and controlling the border, but nothing on abortion, guns, gay marriage or the like. He does identify himself as “a very conservative Republican.”
So, voters in the 12th, make sure you know that the Mike Doyle you see on your ballot is not the Mike Doyle you may have voted for previously. Different Mike Doyle. And despite any protestations he’s made, the new Mike Doyle secretly knows that the name confusion will earn him votes, perhaps enough to take the win he might otherwise not get. He did in fact have lawn signs made that say “Democrats for Doyle,” so the confusion isn’t something he’s trying to stop but rather is actively taking part in.
Be smart. Pay attention. And tell others.
Vote for who you want, but heckin’ make sure you’re voting for who you want.
5. And finally …
Can this election please be over now before a candidate literally just puts a Kermit the Frog meme on a billboard and calls it outreach?
Oh wait. This just in. The Fetterman campaign has unveiled Fettermemes.com because John Fetterman’s entire campaign is now geared toward being an online troll. I cannot. I cannot.
Everyone knows how much John loves memes. Now yinz have a chance to make your own memes and videos highlighting how Dr. Oz is not from PA, spent his career getting rich off of scamming ordinary people and can't be trusted to look out for anyone but himself in the US Senate. Take a look through our video library below and our photo library to the right. Use the meme generator to the right for memes and your favorite program for videos. Send your best memes and videos to memes@johnfetterman.com or post them and tag us on twitter. We'll share the best stuff!
I’m done. I’m voting Fetterman. But my God. Enough.
6. Have a great week!
There’s a Post-Gazette labor strike happening right now and while there are some union members choosing not to take part in the strike, I’ll hold off on submitting any op-eds or personal essays until such a time as things are hopefully worked out to allow these journalists and newspaper laborers to return to work. That means next week you might be getting an essay I had planned to submit to them rather than the usual newsletter. We shall see.
If you’re angry about my stance on pigeons, you can call PETA at 1-757-622-7382 and press option 8 for “SHE’S BEING MEAN TO THE DEMONS AGAIN, WAHHH.” Those of you who understand just how right I am about pretty much everything, stop down this week to see my band The Fake Mike Doyles.
We’re a Real Mike Doyles cover band.