Happy Wednesday, Burghers!
Let’s chat about time. TIME. Nearly two years into this pandemic and I’m still struggling to get a solid grasp on the ever-shifting concept of time. It’s not just the years and months throwing me off. It’s days. Weeks. Minutes. My family teases me because I think 1995 was ten years ago. I’ll say, “Oh, it’s about 9 p.m.” and it’s 5:22. Thinking I slept fifteen minutes too long, I frantically woke my daughter up at 6:20 a.m. to get ready for school … ON A SUNDAY (she’s still pissed). I recently had to answer some personal questions on a Zoom call and was asked a simple question: When did you separate? And reader, I got quiet. Real quiet. Because math things were happening in my big useless brain.
Okay, let’s see, 1995 was ten years ago and the pandemic started 657 months ago, carry the one. Regroup. Subtract the leap days. Solve for X. Square root of the triangle. And my answer was, no joke, “What year are we in? Is it 2020?”
I take some comfort that I don’t seem to be the only one still riding this Inception struggle bus. We had book club last week and one member with three children texted she’d be arriving late. Fifteen minutes into the charcuterie phase of club, she walked in, frazzled, clad in a sweatsuit and what might have been slippers on her feet, clutching a bottle of red to her chest like it was suckling. Not ten minutes later, on that the 12th day of November, she said, and I QUOTE, “Can you believe it’s already the end of November?”
TIME HAS NO MEANING. Let’s just cancel it. Related, I’m 36 again. Next year I’ll be 32. Make a note.
Let’s get to it.
1. Steelers-Lions tie it up lololololol
How about that Steelers tie game? The fumbles! The dropped passes! The flags! The interceptions and missed field goals and the slippery ball popping out of hands like it just exited a birth canal! The rollercoaster of follies had my family whiplashing between screams of joy and shrieks of horror like we were six hits into some really bad bath salts. My father — a minister, a devout believer in an omnipotent higher power, also believes he brings the Steelers bad luck when he sits down to watch their games. Therefore most of the time he’s watching from the kitchen like a pierogi-making grandma, or he’s peeking one eye around a corner like a nebby house cat.
When he does venture in to watch, he, well, I’ll just show you:
A ball of tension. Hunched over. Arms crossed. Watching at an odd angle because watching it head-on would allow the fumble demons to escape from the TV to feed on his soul. As you can see from the picture, it was late in OT. Right after I snapped this pic, my sister said, “Dad, sit down.” Readers, my dad sat down. On the couch. Facing the television. And the demons went …
And Pat Freiermuth immediately fumbled the ball.
If any Steelers fans would like my sister’s home address so you can throw trash on her lawn for telling my dad to sit down, please let me know.
2. Can you find Orygone on a map?
I have not stopped thinking about this map since I saw this tweet by a person who could not stop thinking about this map.
Mecseco. NEWMECSECO. Erie Ocean. Tennennennesee’s Virginia Slims-looking ass. Ohio the size of Australia. And then there’s Pennsylvania. We are three things, according to this map: Punxy, smoke, and a pay road. Hey, not just ANY pay road, the most expensive pay road in the entire world! Put some respect on it.
I mean, at some point those goobers at the Turnpike Commission will have priced the road out of general use, right? At some point, it’s just not worth it. And I hear you, you there, with the hair and the face. You’re opening up Gmail so you can send me a note about how the Commission has no choice, they’re at the mercy of blah-blah-blah. You can write that email, print it out and go throw it on my sister’s lawn. Let me know if you need the address.
3. Is that a rotunda or are you just happy to see me?
A Pittsburgh attorney had a no good very bad rotten terrible day recently.
A Pittsburgh attorney removed his pants at the entrance of a Downtown court building Wednesday afternoon after becoming frustrated when his suspenders repeatedly set off metal detectors, according to the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Office.
I think you all join me in saying, “Wait. What?”
Jeffrey Pollock, the attorney, said the security guards, instead of using the wand, kept forcing him to walk through the metal detector again and again until finally …
After a heated exchange, O’Neill said, Pollock “unhooked his suspenders, dropped his drawers, took them off, and placed them in the bin to go through the metal detector.”
First of all, no one calls pants “drawers,” so I’m already absolutely delighted with the Gomer Pyle flavor of this story. But the added gall. The immense balls. The irreverent panache! To put his pants in the bin and THEN MARCH HIS PANTSLESS SELF AND HIS CAPE OF RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION THROUGH?
Imagine the scene if the metal detector had beeped on his pantsless walk-through. Absolute rotundian pandemonium.
This left Pollock “standing in the middle of the Family Division rotunda wearing only his shirt and underwear,” O’Neill said.
If this happened in a Jim Carrey movie, we’d be howling with laughter at this point and empathising a bit with his frustration. In the end, the attorney was arrested for disorderly conduct and seemed to feel pretty badly about the whole thing.
Buddy, we’re still in this godforsaken pandemic, things still suck, the country is as divided as ever, normal isn’t really normal; it’s more like normal-adjacent, time still has no meaning, sometimes something inside snaps and you just gotta rip your pants off and march your underwear-ed ass through a rotunda while screaming, “I SAID TO JUST USE THE GEE-DEE WAND.”
4. Off with the heads! Literally.
Let’s have a quick Pittsburgh history lesson! About rugby!
Wait! Come back! I promise you’re going to want to stick around for this. Ready? Let’s take it back to 1982, which was about 15 years ago. What?
Okay, fine. It was 723 years ago. Happy, ya nerd?
Anyway, hold on to your naked rotunda butts:
I AM SCREAMING.
That really happened. In March of 1982, two Pitt juniors who played rugby with the Oakland Rugby Club stole 5, 6, 7 or 9 actual human heads from the Pitt School of Medicine (the number varies in reports) and used them as balls in pregame warmups. I feel like it’s pretty crazy that the actual number of skulls was never settled upon. There might be two to four random rugby skulls still floating around Oakland because 1982 was not that long ago. Only like 18 months or so.
From a June 11, 1982 Pittsburgh Press article about the March 20 match:
We really should nail down the number of skulls, guys. But that’s not all! Things got even more Black Mirror, according to that same article:
Rather than return the heads to the bags, the Oakland players adorned the heads with paper crowns and placed them on the end line of the playing field. A cup of beer was placed at each head’s side.
Dying to know what brand of beer. Now, the incident was actually buried for several months by both Pitt administrators and the Juniata local paper who had trouble verifying the facts. When the Press got their hands on a photograph of the incident in question, skulls a-rolling, Pitt was finally confronted about it and there was much dancing around the term “heads,” with Pitt prefering to call them “skulls” or “anatomical materials.”
The final line of the article is one for the ages:
Lordy. So we don’t know how many, we don’t know if they had bodies,
All I know is I’ll never look at the phrase “heads will roll” the same way again.
Oh, they’ll roll. Anywhere from 5 to 9 of them will roll.
There was a person on Reddit not too long ago who claimed they were involved in the whole thing and that it was only one head and it was never kicked. The only way we can settle this matter is for someone at the Post-Gazette to find that picture from 1982 to see what it really showed. Get at me.
5. Cool linear Pittsburgh art
My gift guide is already published, as you know (yes, that pen sold out in hours), but I stumbled on this great shop of linear Pittsburgh skyline art by local artist Bronson Lockwood and wanted to share it because it’s perfect for gift-giving this holiday season:
He also sells art prints of these designs. Love them all. You can choose different colors and styles for the shirts. Shop his stuff via Amazon if that’s more your boat-floater, Captain Stubing.
6. “Did you remember to take the lamp out of the oven?”
Briefly, I wanted to mention this story:
An arson investigation is underway at a University of Pittsburgh student dormitory after officers say a fire extinguisher was placed in a hot oven causing it to explode.
First responders were called to Irvis Hall shortly before 4:40 a.m. Saturday for reports of an oven explosion on the ground floor's common kitchen area. A person told officers they heard a bang and smelled something burning, Pitt police said.
No injuries were reported.
Police didn't immediately have a suspect
Here’s my question. I get that it was 4:40 a.m., and not the normal time to turn on an oven, but is it at all possible that the fire extinguisher was being STORED in the oven and someone didn’t realize that and turned the oven on for some reason OTHER than incendiary deviousness? I don’t know about your house, but growing up, when it was time to make dinner, my mom would open her oven door and pull out a 90-pound nested stack of cookie sheets, cooling racks, baking pans, roasters, toasters, blenders, Bibles … okay, I’m exaggerating a bit on those last few, but still.
So because of that memory of my childhood, watching each evening as my mother Incredible-Hulked an entire Target aisle of pots and pans out of the oven like it was a clown car, my first thought when I read this story was, “Ooooh. Someone forgot to take the oven fire extinguisher out of the oven because clearly the oven fire extinguisher lives in the oven.”
I might be giving these students too much of the benefit of the doubt, but hey, so they exploded a fire extinguisher. At least they’re not dropping their pants in the rotunda or using human heads as volleyballs.
7. That’s all folks!
As we close this edition, I can’t decide if my new band name should be The Fumble Demons, The Turnpike Commission Goobers, The Rotunda Drawer-Drop or The Random Rugby Skulls. But no matter what we call ourselves, our first album is for sure going to be “Punxy, Smoke and a Pay Road.”
I’ll be off next week for Thanksgiving so I’ll see you back here the following Wednesday, which might mean I’ll post on Thursday because I’m just no good at time-math anymore. I always forget to cross-simplify.
Have a great Thanksgiving!