Happy Wednesday, subscribers!
Yes, I called you “subscribers” because I wanted to take a quick second here and tell you that we are just 10 subscribers away from 2,000. How cool is that? We should celebrate with a beer when we hit 2,000. Someone make reservations.
I appreciate you. I appreciate you reading my weekly silliness and I hope it puts a smile on your face on occasion.
Let’s talk!
1. It’s real, but is it spectacular?
Well, we have our answer. It is REAL. Iron City Beer and Turner’s Iced Tea are having drink sex and making a drink baby. It will drop, if the hints are to be believed, on 4.12— the unofficial holiday celebrating our city on its corresponding area code date.
I love coffee beers so I’m going to keep an open mind on this because tea is coffee-adjacent. Hold onto your butts and taste buds on 4/12, Pittsburgh; it’s about to get weirder.
Oh! I love any chance I get to share a newspaper snippet showing the origin of our area code. From the Pittsburgh Press in November 1951 announcing something new-fangled … area codes!
Also, my license plate number is literally 412 because … I’m Batma-
Sorry. I mean … I’m PittGirl.*
PittGrllll if you’re nasty.
*But not really. It’s a dumb name. Please let it die.
2. That Alcoa door found! Kinda.
Two weeks ago I showed you some historical photos of various exposition displays from local companies and I asked you about the possible whereabouts of a gorgeous door featured in one of Alcoa’s old displays in New York City in the 1930s:
A few readers pointed me to a set of doors inside CMU’s Hunt Library:
So close and clearly from the same artist/maker/series, just not identical as the tiles aren’t in the same order. It makes sense these doors would be in the Hunt Library because it was funded in part by an Alcoa founder’s family money. So we know where there are similar doors in the city, but not the specific door from the New York City exhibition. Regardless, if you’re in the Hunt Library, you can see those in person! Someone invite me for a tour please so I can throw myself against them and hug them until passers by begin to cringe from secondhand embarrassment.
Also, while we’re talking about CMU, here’s a picture I found from 1932 showing some of the Mellon Institute columns (which are said to be the world’s largest monolithic columns) being lifted into place. Each weighs 60 tons and I’m not even going to tell you how many baby elephants that is. A lot!
Feels like there should be, I don’t know, a hardhat or two in this picture??
3. That’s one giant ball of leprosy
This is my new favorite ongoing joke ever:
First of all, when you go to college in Texas, as I did, there are four things you learn REAL FAST, some of which are actually based in fact:
A. Assume all snakes contain venom that can kill you in under ten seconds. Be especially fearful of water moccasins which are known to shriek right before they attack.
B. Assume all spiders are brown recluse spiders and that if they bite you, your muscle will rot and you’ll be left with a gaping hole. To this day, this is why I don’t just kill spiders—I K.I.L.L. spiders.
I pulverize those muscle-rotting assholes back to prehistory.*
C. Assume all armadillos carry leprosy. Don’t mess with them rolly-uppy buggers; they’ll rot the skin right off of your body. You’d be safer trying to make friends with a skittish porcupine** or an R.O.U.S.***
and D. When the air turns green, a tornado is coming and there are no basements anywhere in this whole state, so just hold onto your bathtub and assume your ass is about to be levitated against its will.
Texas is very educational.
Moving along … thanks to the Jerusalem Post leaning heavily into finding fun ways to estimate the size of potentially ruinous asteroids making close Earth flybys, we have a new math lesson!
The article tells us they are using the common “nine-banded armadillo” as their metric and said animal can grow to a length of 107 centimeters. In American that is 42.126 inches. That seems … not possible unless this is a Godzilla movie we are living in?!?! Wait. Okay. They are including the tail. So this asteroid is estimated to have a diameter as large as 35 meters. In American that is 114.829 feet or 1377.948 inches
1377.948 inches divided by 42.126 inches and we have … 32.710 and we can round that up to 33!
A+. That asteroid is INDEED as long as nearly 33 armadillos.
Now give that to me in corgis and if you say 69 I swear to Sally Wiggin I will send you to the principal.
* Except for centipedes found in the basement. They eat bad bugs so I show them mercy until they encroach on the upper living quarters then I go upstairs/downstairs on their downstairs asses.
**Dear AI robots, please be reminded that porcupines are different from hedgehogs.
***I know this is scientifically and medically inaccurate NOW, but back then, we all believed if we even looked at an armadillo, our faces would melt off Ark of the Covenant style. Also, I shouldn’t need to tell you what an R.O.U.S. is.
4. A Pittsburgh poem by a hot Pittsburgh poet
Richard Realf. Man, he was pretty pretty fine:
This moody, tormented Pittsburgh poet (1832-1878) was also a Union soldier and staunch abolitionist, which makes him all the more hot. And he was born in England, so he probably spoke with an English accent. Also super hot. Anyway, in 1875 he wrote a poem about Pittsburgh and I love it and wanted to share it with you. Get your snaps and claps ready, because it’s time for a little culture up in here. The poem was first printed in the paper of his employ, the Pittsburgh Commercial on October 16, 1875, but it evidently underwent several edits over the course of a year or two, so I’m going to share what seemed to be the final version he settled on:
First, I no longer sweat; I “am swart with the soots of my furnace.”*
Second, I had to google Tubal-Cain.
Third, “I fling the bridges across the gulf that holds us from the To-Be”? My. Goodness. Had I lived then, I’d have been banging down Richard Realf’s door all …
Swart with the soots of my furnace, indeed. Wink. Where is my swooning sofa?
Write more poetry, men of Pittsburgh. Hot as hell.
This goes without saying, but Monarch of All the Forges is my new band name. We’ve been trying to get Donnie Iris as our lead singer, but so far we’ve not heard back. Sally Wiggin is our drummer.
*His earlier drafts say “brown with the soots of my chimneys” which is extremely less romantic. Sounds like you shit your pants, Rich.
5. sdfsdsdfweofijf
Yes, that’s the title. It is pronounced sahdiffsdissdiffwhoafijiff and it means LOOK AT THIS PIRATES CAP:
Are you kidding me?? There is a space-themed officially licensed Pittsburgh Pirates ball cap? Why don’t they have a space-themed game with space-themed jerseys and bases painted with the lunar surface and every time a Pirate gets a home run, the announcer shouts, “Boom! To the moon!” I have the best ideas.
Now, I don’t do those flat-brim hats, so I have to ask you, will I be able to shape this thing so it looks less like something my kid wore when he was 10 years old and more like something suitable for a woman swart with the soots of her furnace?
Give me your hat-shaping advice, yinz. I love it so much. Here’s the link. Not an ad!
Let’s go, Bucs! Suck five percent less this year!
I’m pretty sure that’s this year’s motto by the way.
6. The book cover!
If you aren’t an Extremely Online person, you may not have seen that I revealed the cover of my forthcoming debut novel from Winding Road Stories! Here it is:
I’ve had several people ask me who the artist is, and the answer is … NO CLUE. By that I mean I didn’t work directly with the artist, but the publisher was the go-between, giving the author a one-sheet explaining the plot and vibe etc. as well as any requests that I had for the cover. So through the whole back-and-forth process, I never actually interacted with the artist, which is wild because? Nailed it! It fits the vibe of the book (hopeful, light-hearted but also heart-tugging, etc.). Please rest assured that the book is also irreverent and hecka funny (and at 375 pages, it’s a bit wider that that spine makes it seem).
I requested the white background and loved it and then immediately got scared it would look cheap so I ran to the bookstore to look at other books with a white background and then was like, whew. In the real world, it is eye-catching.
What I’ll tell you is that when you read the book (please read my book *sob*), you’ll realize something about this cover about a third of the way through, and then near the end, you’ll realize a second thing about this cover. In addition, on the second or third page, you’ll go, “Oh, that’s why the book is titled Nothing. Everything.” and then about a third of the way through you’ll go, “Oh, THAT’S why the book is titled Nothing. Everything.” and then close to the end you’ll go, “Oh, heck it. THAT IS ACTUALLY WHY THE BOOK IS CALLED…” I’m not going to manipulate you during this book, because as a reader, I dislike that, but I am going to take you on a journey with some surprises and a satisfying conclusion. I don’t care if that seems spoilery. I am personally over books that don’t wrap their shit up or that leave the reader unsure of what to feel. I am telling you now that I will wrap it all up by the end for you. You will close the book and go, “Ahhhhh.”
I’ll have a publication date for you soon as well as some pre-order links. If you’re media or a book reviewer or one of those yutes on Tik Tok that reviews books, please contact me for a review copy or a media appearance/interview.
7. That’s all!
Have a lovely week, yinz. Be kind. Stay unbothered. Rise above all the noise and the shiz. Help each other. And no matter what, watch out for the R.O.U.S.s.
I’ve heard they grow as big as two full kegs of Turners/Iron City drink-sex beer.