Hello, loves!
No time for personal chit-chat other than to say that once again I’ll be off next week due to travel, so don’t be refreshing that inbox like the obsessed stalker you are.
Let’s go!
1. Sometimes the poor beat the rich to a whole ass pulp
Let me preface this by giving you the 2022 payrolls of two Major League Baseball teams based on my extensive research*:
The New York Yankees: $245,190,714
The Pittsburgh Pirates: $37,000,000
That is a difference, if you believe in math, of TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS. If you’re a space-loving math-believer who likes all those you can fit this many Earths inside of Jupiter illustrations (1,300**), then you can fit about 6.5 Pirate payrolls into one Yankee payroll.
But that didn’t stop the Pittsburgh Pirates from beating the New York Yankees in front of a near-capacity crowd (made up of TONS of Yankees fans) at PNC Park last night. And yinz, the memes are glorious:
“Reynolds wrapped your L.” I am gone; someone come resuscitate me.
Now, Yankee fans tried to defend their team by bashing the Pirates, but one thing about Pirate fans is this: We know we’re bad and that makes us all the more aware of how bad YOU have to play to lose to us when your payroll is SIX POINT FIVE TIMES LARGER THAN OURS:
I’m 12. Anyway, the Pirates got a win against the New York Yankees and nothing makes sense. Just embrace the batshittery of it all, is my advice.
Let’s go, Bucs!
*ten second Google search
**False. Jupiter is gas. Just gas. You can’t fit anything into it but more gas. Anything you try to fit into Jupiter will fall through it.***
***Also false. Nothing will fall through it. If it doesn’t burn up from the heat of the inner layers, it will eventually float forever under the intense pressure of Jupiter’s metallic hydrogen layer. What I’m trying to tell you is Jupiter might be where Satan lives.
**** *Your, *Postseason
2. We must— We must— We must increase our busts!*****
I took quite a break from my history research after graduation in May, but with grad school starting soon, I’ve jumped back into research mode so I can get a head start on narrowing down the subject for my thesis. That said, I can’t remember how I stumbled on this. I think I was researching the Post-Gazette’s slavery articles from the mid-1800s and that sent me into researching their articles about suffrage and from there I stumbled onto a whole bunch of “ideal woman” shit.
First up, let’s visit 1924. According to an article in the Pittsburgh Gazette Times, University of Pittsburgh professor Dr. Harry C. McKown gave a lecture to the East Liberty YMCA High School Girls Club and told these girls that based on his research, boys want girls who are:
“Feminine. Not the one who single-handed stands off a whole army.” Strike one against me because fuck your dumb army.
“Square” as in doesn’t slap a boy in the face and then say "don’t you dare strike a lady.”
“Exclusive” and not “pawed over by every boy in the community.” I assume he then gave boys a lecture about not pawing over girls.
“Refined” and not the “loud-mouthed queen of burlesque.” Oooh. Strike two against me. (Sign me up, Yankees.) Also, you’re MAD if you think The Loud-mouthed Queens of Burlesque isn’t my new band name. We show so much cleavage you can’t even believe it. That’s our tagline, bee tee double you.
“Aids nature in making herself look like the girl on the magazine cover, but can distinguish between the magazine cover girl and the looks of a cheap chorus girl.” He sounds like he’s about to become the top beauty influencer of his day.
Musical.
Loves fun!
So yeah, be musical and smile more and act shy around boys and watch your potty mouth and if you see an enemy army coming, that’s what your fainting couch is for, babe.
That “ideal girl” column led me to this 1907 Pittsburgh Post “ideal woman” column by Marian Martineau:
This 38 inches was up from the previous summer’s demanded 36-inch bust. Never fear, boob-havers … there are ways, according to this column, to increase your bust size so that you can be society’s ideal, so take notes:
Stand with your weight on the balls of your feet with one foot slightly in front of the other, lift your chin, throw back your shoulders and jut. that. shit. out.
Put your corset very tight and low and “pull the rolls of fat well up above the waistline.” So, like, use belly fat as a boob shelf? That’s inspired.
“Eat what you want” including all candies and cakes and a veritable shitton of corn on the cob in the summer because corn weight only deposits itself on your boobs and nowhere else on your body. I’m not making that up. The advice was to specifically eat corn on the cob as much as possible.
Go outside and exercise because the girls who are outdoors a lot have big boobs and the girl who is small-chested is “bent over sewing all day or at her desk.”
“Learning to use the left arm is very important to bust development. Most women are right-handed and this makes them uneven in chest development.” Be ambidextrous, is the advice.
Ten minutes of deep breathing every day but ONLY if your heart is good because deep breathing will kill a person with a bad heart, according to this woman. Her instructions are to take a deep breath in. Hold it. Expel it slowly. This could kill you, you see.
Spatting the chest with hot and then cold water. What is spatting? I’m scared to look it up because it feels like a word the Urban Dictionary will have stolen but here goes. Okay. Spatting is slapping. So get you some cold water and slap it on your boobs and then do the same with hot. kinda like you’re Pillsbury Doughing those babies to rise up.
Have a small waist. Eat all the candy and sweets and oils and specifically gorge yourself on high-carb corn on the cob until you poop out a whole cob’s worth of unchewed kernels, but your waist should be 24 inches and your hips should be 44 inches. Got that? 38-24-44. Be that or GTFOH.
Be worryless. Girls who don’t worry and are carefree have big boobs, you see.
Got all that? Stand like you’ve got a knife to your back, stay outside, don’t be right-handed, eat like you’ve got a tapeworm but also make sure you have a small waist, smack the girls up real good every day with wildly varied water temperatures, give up your studies, make a boob shelf with your fat rolls, and, if it won’t kill you … breathe.
RIP to all the women of Pittsburgh who lived whole lives not knowing they didn’t need to be that and could instead be a Nellie Bly who said how about no?
In two weeks, I’ll share some snippets from a regular 1915 Pittsburgh Gazette Times column in which a doctor answers medical questions sent in by regular Pittsburgh folk. Some of them are just AMAZING.
***** I don’t know what this is from but I remember reading it in a preteen book when I was younger.
3. Wait. Wut.
Let’s swing to local politi— WAIT! Don’t go! It’s not about your boy Fetterman or Dr. New Jersey. It’s about Rich Fitzgerald and drilling … for gas.
Allegheny County Council voted 11-4 to ban natural gas drilling and other industrial activities like fracking and mining in their parks.
Seems right. They are parks. They are owned by “the people.” Protect them in this increasingly fragile environment and ecosystem.
“Unconventional oil and gas development is a heavy industrial process involving large areas of land, equipment, trucks, chemicals, and water. It generates millions of tons of solid waste and millions of gallons of liquid waste,” said John Stolz, a professor and director of Duquesne University’s Center for Environmental Research and Education. Stolz told the council that water produced as a byproduct contains “high concentrations of salts, heavy metals, and radioactive elements.”
Now, Fitzgerald who claims to both support natural gas drilling (he approved of the Deer Lakes drilling lease back in 2014 after all) and to also have “no plans to allow any drilling or related activity in any of our parks,” said he will veto this bill.
Not surprising. What is surprising is the reason he claims he’ll do so via a word salad letter.
Let me give you the tl;dr version of his letter. Drilling bad. Drilling good. We won’t drill anymore, I promise. I won’t sign this because it might prevent FUTURE county executives from allowing drilling. I won’t make those decisions for them.
Let that absorb into your brain noodles for a second.
What the hell kind of bullshit cop out is that? He wants to veto it because he is a friend of (beholden to?) the local shale industry but he’s claiming he will veto it because he IS AN ELECTED LEADER WHO DOESN’T WANT TO LEAD.
“I won’t make decisions for those future officials.”
Claiming you won’t make a decision because your future replacement(s) might want something different is a lie hidden inside a heaping pile of dung.
That’s what you’re elected to do. To make things PERPETUALLY better based on the will of the people who elected you. Along those lines, elected leaders could have said things like:
I really want to sign this seat belt thing into law, but what if in ten years the next elected person doesn’t want that?? Maybe they want babies flying out of mamas’ arms. You ever think of that? How can I do that to them!?
I really am against dumping industrial waste into our rivers and turning them into open sewers. I swear. But you want me to sign a law banning that?! How can I do that to whomever is in this office twenty years from now!?
His gross and lecturing letter claims he’s also vetoing it because “any future legislation can simply repeal this one.”
Yes. That’s how legislation works, you NIMROD. We are aware of that. As we learned from Roe’s fall, literally anything can be done away with in the future. But your job is to do something now while you have the power to do it; that’s what you’re elected to do. The problem here is YOU DON’T ACTUALLY WANT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, so you’re hoping we’re stupid enough to believe this bullshit. We aren’t.
It’s a cop-out and it’s a plain one and you should have just told the truth. “Politically, it works in my favor to tell you I care about our parks and our environment. But I’m in a powerful industry’s pocket and so I gotta veto this.”
I know I seem to say this quite a bit lately, but I truly mean it:
Get in the sea, Rich Fitzgerald.
I’ma get that on a shirt.
4. Swindell Bridge is falling down— falling down— EVERYBODY!
Here’s some fun news!
The Swindell Bridge on Pittsburgh’s North Side will remain closed indefinitely until damage caused during milling and paving last week can be repaired, city officials said Tuesday.
The bridge, which connects Perry North to Northview Heights over I-279, underwent maintenance work last week but was shut down Friday when debris fell from the bridge to the highway below.
So, let me make sure I understand this. REPAIRS to the bridge DAMAGED the bridge and now it’s pooping concrete and it’s closed indefinitely and we are all definitely going to die on a Pittsburgh bridge.
Now, I’m not a civil engineer and I don’t honestly know how this all works, but I feel like if your bridge is in such a state of disrepair that merely paving it causes it to crumble, THAT BRIDGE IS NO GOOD.
F-minus.
Here’s a Reddit comment from six months ago:
As we now know from Fern Hollow, THAT IS A THING THAT SOMETIMES HAPPENS.
I’m going to start wearing a parachute when I drive, just in case I need to bail out the window of my plummeting car.
5. And that’s all I have for today!
I’ll see you in two weeks back here where I’ll give you all the terrible medical advice you could ever need based on a 1900s Pittsburgh doctor’s advice to Pittsburghers. Spoiler: the bowels really come into play.
And as always, if you’re upset about me bashing Rich Fitzgerald, here’s the number to call: 412-492-9190.
They might say, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s,” but I swear they’ll give me the message.