Hello hello!
I have a science question and I want you to answer it without Googling. The weekend before last I was up in the Lake Chautauqua area for a girls trip with my sister and a good friend. The first thing you should know is that I’ve decided I’m going to be a lake person from now on. Oceans have bitey monsters and life-sucking currents. Rivers have literal skeletons, bitey monsters (there’s a whole show about them) and life-sucking currents. No thanks. Small lakes are where it’s at. Anyway! We went to a local brewery. I am not a beer person; I rarely drink it and when I do, my preference is a salty sour lime beer — a margarita wearing beer clothes, basically. So I ordered a salty sour lime beer and I found that it wasn’t salty enough. So I grabbed the salt grinder from the table and I added a few twists to my beer.
Reader … a visual:
I attempted to staunch the flow of foam with my mouth but I gave up when I began choke-sputtering, and said foam and beer then spread unhindered across the table, requiring a huge stack of cart-pilfered napkins to sop up. It was like my beer birthed a whole second beer. Matter from nothingness. That should have ended it. But my friend, who is brilliant by the way, watches this happen and a few minutes later as we are discussing the science of beer, she’s wondering if maybe she was wrong when she told me that if you salt a beer it will do that. Maybe it was just my particular beer? So she grabbed the salt and added a twist to her own beer to experiment.
Nothing happened.
For four seconds.
Reader … a visual:
There is no way our brewery hijinks aren’t on someone’s TikTok page right now with a #lookatthesedumbbitches hashtag. So to sum up, the morals of my story are … 1. I’m a lake person now and by extension, a boat person. 2. Don’t add salt to your beer, you uncouth trash person.
Let’s talk Pittsburgh!
1. Because I don’t have enough going on …
Once upon a time in Pittsburgh there existed a downtown post office on Fourth Avenue that was glorious and gargantuan and looked like it would be the TikTok house of the Wizard of Oz, the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula and The Beast*.
As you can see, the arches of the structure had keystones that were faces meant to represent the races of the world. When the building was razed, some decorative pieces were salvaged and moved. Like the Ladies of Stone statues you see in Station Square, Mount Washington and near the Children’s Museum. Like those keystones which are displayed along the wall of the Children’s Museum parking lot. See:
This got me thinking: why don’t we have a Google Map that marks these relics, tells us where they originally were (if moved), and then lets us see a picture of them in their original iteration? So I’m creating that and I am currently deep into research mode. What I need is for you to email me or direct-message me** via Twitter or Insta (@janepitt on both) anything you can think of that I should include. Think the smokestacks at the Waterfront, the Gate D tower from Three Rivers Stadium, the Forbes Field wall sections, the Manchester Bridge portal on the North Side, the Manchester Bridge pier supports used in the Mister Rogers statue. Once I have all my facts and photos together and their old and (in some cases) new GPS locations exacted, I’ll get with my former butler Woy and other techy Burghers to get the map created. It would be a really cool way to show people the city while also remaining loyal to our Burghy penchant of NEVER EVER FORGETTING WHERE THINGS USED TO BE SO MAKE A LEFT AT THE RAX.
* Imagine the content coming out of THAT house. “We replaced Dracula’s fridge blood with Heinz ketchup. Let’s see what happens.”
**No nudes unless you’re sending me pictures of cute nude wedge booties, because I need a new pair for Fall.
2. Perfectly normal … for a yinzer
If anyone ever asks you, “At its core, what does the word yinzer mean?” I want you to whip out your phone and show them this picture:
Your brain is having trouble processing this, so let me help you: this is a Craigslist for-sale ad for an old toilet like you’d find in your gram’s house, or more likely, basement, and this toilet once housed fecal matter. Said toilet is now a place to toast your kielbasa buns while also keeping your ahrns cold.
The word yinzer perfectly described in one picture.
The item is no longer listed on Craigslist and I don’t know if that means Craigslist took it down with a “YOU CANNOT SELL A TOILET GRILL COOLER ON HERE, YOU UNCOUTH TRASH PERSON!” email, or if it means someone actually bought it. If you are that someone, might I interest you in this little article entitled, “What happens if you eat poop?”
Best wishes.
3. The annual money grab
I just peeked into my Bad News We’ve Come to Expect file and found this:
There’s a whole Act 44 component to this that has been mansplained to me so so many times—every time I talk about the Turnpike price increases, in fact, so we aren’t even going there. Here’s the important thing to ask: when will it end?
The answer?
Based on current traffic and revenue projections, the commission said it plans to increase rates 5% a year through 2025, 4% in 2026, 3.5% in 2027 and then 3% annually from 2028 to 2050.
Never. Never is when it will end. You’ll pay increasingly ridiculous tolls and then one day you’ll die because you cooked a rabbit over a toilet bowl and then you’ll go to hell and discover you’re spending an eternity driving uphill behind a slow-going fast-lane semi truck while your bank account gradually drains and the Turnpike commission eventually pulls up alongside your car and takes your back-seat firstborn as payment for the eternal trip to Philly.
As I said, best wishes.
4. Pittsburgh Woman > Florida Man
Let me put my kid gloves on for this one and also a pair of muck-waders because it’s about to get both delicate and extremely messy up in here. You know about the video. That video. From Foxtail/Skybar in the South Side. The one. That I haven’t watched. Because I don’t know the amount of eyebleach I’ll need to unsee it.
But it happened, it was wild, it went viral, the club shut itself down blaming their “clientele” in a way that hints at racism because, let’s be real, the South Side has never not been a raging drunken mess. I’m not going to unpack all of that because others have done a good job of it. I just want to point out one statement from Local magistrate Eugene Ricciardi:
“That is an embarrassment," Ricciardi told WPXI. "That video went viral across the United States…
And indeed, as I mentioned already, it went viral. But Ricciardi goes on:
…We have people in Florida that saw that video, what does that say about us,” says Ricciardi.
I just …
Like that’s what Florida has become. The home of Florida Man. The home of the weird news stories that sound like a game of Mad Libs: “Florida Man wrecks [noun], blames it on [noun].”
Did anyone have caterpillar? Caterpillar is what we were looking for.
So yinzers are AGHAST to be compared to Florida. The very thought of someone in Florida seeing that video and judging us? Florida!? We’re better than America’s penis!
We sure are. Let’s just pretend like the beer cooler barbeque toilet doesn’t exist.
4. “Sir, Mister Rogers is on line 2.” “Well, shit.”
I once spent weeks reading every single mention of Mister Rogers’ name in the Post-Gazette archives. That’s how dedicated I was to learning about the man as I came to terms with his meaning to me as a hearing-impaired child. So I was so surprised to see this story I wasn’t aware of on Twitter:
Fred Rogers was in fact extremely non-litigious. So how much do we love him for drawing the line here? A lot. Based on my research, there was one other time where Mister Rogers could have gone for a lawyer, but he didn’t. Here’s how I wrote it in my Pittsburgh Magazine piece a few years back.
In 1984, Burger King ran a commercial featuring a Mister Rogers parody, Mister Rodney. Rather than hire a team of lawyers, Fred placed a phone call to an executive at the food chain and simply asked that the commercial be pulled. The company complied, stating, “Mr. Rogers is one guy you don’t want to mess with…”
I nearly wanted to put “(sic)” after that “Mr. Rogers,” because we all know it is stylized as Mister.
But yes, I can’t imagine any brand wanting to upset Fred Rogers or, as he said, get his goat. I’m going to dive into this Burger King incident much deeper at a later date for you, because it’s honestly fascinating the local path it took back in 1984.
More soon on that. I just don’t have the space or time today to do it justice. But suffice it to say, if you see Mister Rogers’ goat, leave it alone.
5. It’s a short one today …
… because I just received an email from NASA that I’ve been accepted to go to Florida at the end of the month to watch the Artemis launch and I need to go process and freak out about that in a whole bunch of ways. I will of course write about my experience and all its Astrobotic local connections (not sure where those words will appear, honestly, but I’ll keep you posted).
Have a great week and be sure to catch my band The Uncouth Trash Persons. Please throw tomatoes at us. Rotten ones. We love it. Because we’re trash people.
I said nothing political or otherwise controversial so there’s no customer service line this week. I’ll be sure to try to piss a bunch of you off next week though.
Best wishes.