Moving house in Pittsburgh. LITERALLY.
Neural Net Guesser Porcupine-Lover AI-Bed-Shitters RISE UP
Do not adjust your screens. It is Thursday. Yesterday was Wednesday and it got away from me before I could find time to write. So you’ll get the newsletter on a Thursday and you’ll like it, or maybe you’ll hate it and honestly, only email me if you like it. If you hate it, go to www.pghremains.com, scroll down to the contact form and click the “I am being mean” button. Thank yewwww. Let’s talk!
1. Turners and IC Light made a chaotic evil baby
Local beer distributor Frank B. Fuhrer Wholesale tweeted what some will equate to a photo of manna from heaven and others to a photo of a demon from hell:
I have some questions. I have some statements. I might have some throw-up in my mouth.
I am not a beer connoisseur. You know this. I said it just a few weeks ago (months ago? years? what is time?) To me, most beer tastes like beer. I can tell you if beer is bad, but I can’t tell you if a beer is good. Same with wine. When the wine turns to vinegar, I’m like, “I do declare this vintage is poor. 2021 was not a good year for boxes of wine. Open a fresh one, Fitzgerald, and fetch the carriage. We must away.”
But iced tea-flavored beer? Even if it combines two iconic Pittsburgh brands, I don’t know what to think. Is this good? Bad? So bad it’s good, or so good it circles all the way back to bad? Is it even real? It doesn’t seem to be fake as there are tweets from people who have sampled the test batch. And Turners did sell glasses branded with the combo. But maybe it’s all a set-up for an elaborate April Fool’s joke? Regardless, judging by responses, yinzers are 95% in the “my body is ready” category and 5% sticking with, “I’d rather drink straight from the Mon with a bubble tea straw*.”
I think the lesson we will eventually learn from this is the same lesson I learned when I was 8 and decided to mix a bunch of cheap store-brand perfumes I bought from Hills Department Store to create one new super perfume, and that lesson is this: Just because you CAN, doesn’t mean you SHOULD, because if you DO, you might get a six-day headache.
Get that embroidered on a pillow. Send me $200 for the idea.
*Someone add that to Dumb Ways to Die please
2. AI Pittsburgh
I love Artificial Intelligence (AI). I am not one of those people who thinks the machines will rise up anytime soon to destroy humanity, if ever. I generally understand how AI and machine-learning works, and therefore I understand the limitations. I follow a Twitter account that feeds memes into a neural-net program to have it identify objects in photos, and despite the machine “learning” as it goes along, it still …
NINETY-FIVE POINT TWO ONE PERCENT CONFIDENT THAT THIS IS A PORCUPINE. Even though it’s clearly a hedgehog — even though it literally says “hedgehog” — the machine’s over-confident ass was like:
I use AI tools. I use Consensus to help me understand what the current established historical consensus is for topics I’m researching. I use Opinionate to create debates about issues I want to understand better from both sides, and I use Chat.GPT and DALL-E, mostly for fun. The machines? Are pretty fantastic at their jobs, Neural Net Guesser Porcupine-Lover AI-Bed-Shitter aside.
This week I asked DALL-E to create a picture of “Fred Rogers on a bridge in Pittsburgh in autumn” and I just …
I’m scared, you guys. More cursed than the beer-tea box. What a nightmare. Then I thought, well, there are photos of me online. Wonder if it would crawl out there and see what I look like and put me on the moon? So I asked DALL-E to show me “Virginia Montanez on the moon.” My yinz…
I am my own nightmare.
I’m getting THAT on a pillow. I will sell it to you for a thousand bucks. Finally, I asked DALL-E for “a post-impressionist painting of Pittsburgh in the winter” and …
It’s perfect, you crazy-ass dumb-smart machine. Perfect. Anyway! The machines are great but also probably not smart enough to kill us all anytime soon. We’re doing a much better job of that ourselves with disease, guns and stupidity. Looking at you mostly, Florida. And a little bit at you, Fayette County.*
* Oh, come on. Don’t be mad. I haven’t made a Fayette County joke in like a year!
3. When you use the term “move” literally
My latest history column for Pittsburgh Magazine takes us back to 1911 when they picked up the Elizabeth Steel Magee Hospital at Forbes and Halket and moved/rotated it a total of 112 feet, without interrupting utilities or hospital services.
This ambitious relocation, with patients still inside, took six weeks of methodical crawling from April to October. During that time, as the hospital inched carefully to its new home, 25 babies were born within its walls — or, as The Pittsburgh Press put it, “The Stork meeting all his engagements and the quarter hundred little ones arriving hearty and sound.”
(The next time you’re trying to make a small number sound like a big number, try using “quarter hundred” in place of 25. “I have a quarter hundred dollars in my checking account” doesn’t sound too terrible.)
Lol. Sometimes I make myself laugh. I mean, if I tell you I ate a quarter-hundred Thin Mints, you’re gonna judge me. If it tell you I only ate 25 Thin Mints, you’ll be like, “Wow, wish I had your willpower. I ate half-hundred.” Numbers are funny. And not real. Here’s a newspaper clipping and map images showing how the hospital moved:
And that’s just the start of what I found about buildings being moved back then. You already know the Heinz House was floated from Sharpsburg to the North Side in 1904:
In 1921, long-gone St. Nick’s on the North Side was moved 20 feet back and 8 feet up to make room for Route 666. Excuse me; I mean Route 28.
Here’s a house being moved in Oakmont in 1942. It went from Pennsylvania Ave. to Second St. and it took three days during which the family lived in the home.
And this one is just insane. In 1903, a 24-room mansion was moved 160 feet UP. A. HILL. in Squirrel Hill and then 600 additional feet. The pictures are something.
St. Mary’s Church was moved in 1921, and the West Pennsylvania Freight Station was moved in 1906 while the employees worked inside, just to name two of many other instances. I think the point I’m trying to make is this: Have you ever said, “I love my house, but I hate the location*. Wish I could pick it up and move it”?
My god, people, apparently we can! Because 100 years ago people in Pittsburgh were like, “There’s a bigger lot for sale down the street. If we start now, the house can be there by Wednesday.”
*Literally said this about my old house that was 127 years old CRYYYY.
4. “Greetings from this piece of crap city”
Each day I try to set aside an hour for creative research to find useful primary sources for my 1918 pandemic Masters thesis. I thought to hunt eBay for Pittsburgh postcards sent in late 1918 that might make reference to the influenza epidemic here. I haven’t found any yet, but I did find this postcard sent from Pittsburgh in March 1918:
For those who can’t read cursive*: “I’m back in this dirty old city again. Norman.”
The end. Period. No “How are you?” Just went from 0 to THIS PLACE SUCKS ASS without taking a breath. The juxtaposition of the beautiful picture on the front with his this place is awash in filth sass on the back is perfection. Big Sienna Miller “Shittsburgh” energy. I hope Norman ended up having a lovely time even if he had to change his shirt six times a day because of the air.
*Everyone under the age of quarter-hundred probably. Damn yutes.
5. Let’s wrap it up!
I had lots more I wanted to mention, but I’m out of space for this week because of all the pictures! I’ll put those items in my pocket for next week. For now, have a great week! Be kind! And be sure to check out my all-girl punk band Hedgehog Anatomy!
Please don’t throw bras or underpants though. We prefer snarky embroidered pillows and fresh boxes of wine.
We’re classy, n’at.