Pat Cloonan has the full story in tonight's Daily News:
"Now, there is a chance that we can make a few bucks so my wife can go to a rest home. I don't give a damn about myself."
With those words, an 86-year-old Italian immigrant capped a brief forum last night before Homestead council took over the fate of the bar he bought in 1947. ....
By a 9-0 vote, council accepted Historic Architectural Review Board's recommendation that Anchor Properties receive a certificate of appropriateness to demolish Chiodo's, as well as a Subway sandwich shop and a Shell service station along W. Eighth Avenue and Hays Street.
The vote was not one of approval for what will replace the three businesses --- a Walgreens pharmacy, a new Subway and a parking lot. That will require another round, beginning next month with Homestead Planning Commission and ending, possibly Oct. 14, back before council.
More Chicago media news, because after all, what else would a McKeesport-based Web site focus on?
After several weeks of seemingly liking everything (three stars for "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle"?), the irascible Roger Ebert that we all know and love is back, and he's out for revenge:
"The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement" offers the prudent critic with a choice. He can say what he really thinks about the movie, or he can play safe by writing that it's sure to be loved by lots of young girls. But I avoid saying that anything is sure to be loved by anybody.
In this case, I am not a young girl, nor have I ever been, and so how would I know if one would like it? Of course, that's exactly the objection I get in e-mails from young readers, who complain that no one like me can possibly like a movie like this. They are correct. I have spent a long time, starting at birth and continuing until this very moment, evolving into the kind of person who could not possibly like a movie like this, and I like to think the effort was not in vain.
Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.
And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.
Did the Dave Matthews Band slime a boatload of Chicago tourists? The band says no.
But this much is certain: This past Sunday, two tour buses, while crossing an open-grate bridge over the Chicago River, dumped (no pun intended) the contents of their septic tanks.
Directly underneath that bridge? A ferry boat carrying people on a tour of architectural landmarks.
Mike Thomas of the Chicago Sun-Times apparently couldn't resist writing this, but he should have: "Sightseers trying to enjoy a Chicago Architecture Foundation river tour Sunday afternoon discovered the true meaning of poop deck when they were splattered by raw sewage."
Hey, let's leave the smarty-pants one-liners to the blogs, mm-kay?
According to the Sun-Times, at least five people went to the hospital, and the owner of the cruise line has had to replace clothing for dozens of people. Now the police are investigating.
A first-person account in the Chicago Tribune paints a more vivid picture:
People wiped off their glasses, took off their coats, and sat in stunned anger. What could you do? I was on the boat with my girlfriend and a friend of hers visiting from out of town. They, too, managed to avoid the worst of it and we hustled down into the boat's main cabin. There we could avoid the stench up top but could clearly hear people puking in the nearby bathrooms.
I wrote that my ear had latched onto "Democrat Party," and I recognized it as an expression that immediately identifies the speaker as a whiny, partisan Republican.
The conceit is that the party "is not democratic," as Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp said during his 1996 convention acceptance speech. "They don't have faith in people," Kemp went on. "They have faith in government."
Hence "Democrat Party" in speeches by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, in Republican radio ads and in the foamings of every third caller to what I tautologically call conservative talk radio.
Bob Dole's famous snarl about "Democrat wars" goes back 25 years, and published sources variously first attribute "Democrat Party" to Thomas Dewey in the 1940s and Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.
(Consumer) advocates say the program takes advantage of consumers, particularly elderly people, who may be easily confused over what their options are. According to an AARP survey from 1998, the latest year for which figures are available, 6 percent of people 75 or older leased their phone, compared with 2 percent under 65.
Obtain convenient same or similar model replacement of the leased product for any reason ... Trade-in or exchange the leased product for a different color or for a telephone with more or fewer features ... Plus, if you move take the leased product with you anywhere in the continental US. ... Receive the leased product at your home or office the next business day at no charge.
One of the nice things about moving (actually, the only thing) has been finding a boatload of stuff that I forgot I had. Living in tiny spaces means that a lot of my things have been packed away in storage, and sitting in my new dining room, opening the boxes, is like opening time capsules.
Let me be clear: There has been nothing of value in any of the boxes so far. (Well, OK, so I did find some pennies in the bottom of one of the boxes, and some 34-cent stamps.)
Anyway, it's truly a mishmash of stuff, and much of it is composed of newspaper clippings and photocopies of items related to local history. There's information about the volunteer fire companies in North Versailles Township. A story about the Army Corps of Engineers rerouting the channel of Turtle Creek as part of a flood control project.
There are several folders of clips about radio broadcasting; the oldest is a photocopy of an announcement that Joseph Horne department store placed in the Pittsburgh Sun in 1920. It advertises "Wireless Sets for Sale" that readers could use to pick up the "air concerts" from the amateur radio station that was about to become KDKA.
I pulled that off of the microfilm at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh years ago, and forgot that I had it until this week.
Of course, there's all kinds of memorabilia from Our Fair City, including credit card statements from Jaison's and Cox's (recovered from an old file cabinet I found years ago), cancelled checks from the First National Bank of McKeesport (merged into Western Pennsylvania National Bank in 1959 or '60) and other detritus.
Once I get the scanner plugged in, I'll have all kinds of new stuff for the Web page. It's odd to think that I was collecting this stuff years ago, without ever realizing there would be such a thing as the "Internet" that I could use to inflict it on other people.
There is also a fair amount of wreckage from my newspaper career: Memos to and from editors, letters of praise from readers (and some hate mail), and a bunch of newsroom phone lists that are now useless, because 90 percent of the people named no longer work for the papers in question. I also found a sheaf of company newsletters, which are amusing in a sick way.
Besides newsletters from the companies for which I've worked, I also have some old company newsletters from the failed Penn Central railroad, Westinghouse Air Brake Co., and U.S. Steel. I'm convinced that company newsletters can serve the same purpose to students of corporate politics as Pravda and Izvestia served to Kremlinologists during the Cold War. By studying who gets praised, who gets slammed and who just gets ignored, you start to see patterns in who is about to get promoted --- and who's about to be transferred to the Level Green office. (The people who get ignored are probably going to stay in their positions forever.)
Ironically, I'll probably keep the railroad and steel company newsletters, but not the ones that I received personally. Why? Eh. I lived it. I don't need to read about it.
Have I mentioned there's a built-in barbecue grill at the side of the new house? No? Well, except for a few mementos, I think I'm gonna pile all of the newspaper leftovers --- including the newsletters --- into the grill and set a torch to them. Maybe I'll invite all of the other newsroom refugees I know over, and we can all drink beer and complain as we watch this stuff burn.
...
It's always nice to see a local institution in the news, but this is not the kind of publicity that UPMC McKeesport hospital needed:
Investigators are again trying to solve the mystery of who was behind the deadly anthrax attacks following 9-11; and their latest efforts are focusing on a doctor with ties to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dr. Ken Berry works in the emergency room at UPMC McKeesport. He was arrested Thursday, accused of assaulting four family members in New Jersey just hours after authorities raided his parents' summer home.
Someone get me the address of the Ford Foundation. I've developed a scientific theory that, based on empirical evidence, speculates a object exists even though it can't be seen. I need a grant to further my research.
It isn't a black hole, or even a healthy food item at Denny's; though those are both mysterious objects that have never been seen.
Basically, my theory is this: I've never seen a new rental truck, and every time I've ever rented a truck, it's been a nearly useless piece of worn-out junk. Yet it seems unlikely that rental companies would set out to buy completely useless pieces of junk, so at some point in the past, all rental trucks were new; therefore, even though we can't see new rental trucks, they do exist. QED. I'm calling it Jason's First Theorem of Rental Trucks.
Jason's Corollary of Rental Truck Visibility dictates, however, that rental trucks remain invisible until they reach a certain number called "X," which is a mathematical function of time, the cost of repairing the various mechanical problems, and the number of safety violations; though the exact relationship between those numbers isn't yet known, X can be expressed in dollars per second.
Admittedly, my sample hasn't been that broad. I've only ever rented trucks from a company that shall remain nameless. Perhaps rental trucks from other companies aren't rattling deathtraps. Further study is needed; once the grant money comes through, I'll rent some of those yellow trucks, and the white trucks with the blue and orange logos.
Anyway, I had to move some things from the Old Place to the New House on Monday, so I called Nameless Truck Rentals.
For $19.95 plus mileage plus tax, I was told, a 14-foot truck with a loading ramp would be waiting for me. The brother of me drove me to the rental truck place bright and early Monday morning. I forked over the credit card and the clerk rang up the sale, then stepped into the back room.
A few minutes later, I hit the dirt, thinking from the noise and smell that there had been an explosion at a diesel-fuel refinery. Nope: It was only the clerk, pulling up to the building in the truck. The front of the truck had tangled with a low wall at some point; with its bumper stove in, the truck looked as if it was grimacing. The tachometer bumped back and forth between 0 and 200 RPM as the motor coughed, caught and ran, coughed, caught and ran; and there was a large chunk of padding torn from the dashboard on the passenger side.
When I drove off of Nameless Truck Rental Co.'s lot and hit the brakes at the first intersection, I learned how the padding had been torn; obviously, a frightened passenger had yanked a piece of the dashboard loose while bracing for impact. After Brother parked his car, I picked him up so that he could help with the move. He quickly learned to assume the crash position whenever a red light loomed, and I noticed his clenched fingers neatly fit the divots on the dash.
Once the truck warmed up, we learned of another charming feature: The built-in smoke screen that came from beneath the truck (in the general vicinity of the exhaust system) that kept other cars up to 50 feet away from us. That was a good thing, too, because turning the steering wheel didn't issue demands to the truck's front tires so much as recommendations: "In the future, you may wish to veer towards port." That made foolish maneuvers (say, going around a bend, or pulling into traffic) exercises in blind faith.
I'm glad I couldn't see anything in the mirrors (which were stuck and couldn't be adjusted), because I don't think I would have liked seeing all of the frightened faces around me.
If I can digress, there is a section of pavement at the very top of Dravosburg Hill that's been a lumpy, bumpy washboard for as long as I can remember. Occasionally the county makes a half-hearted stab at repaving it, but the blacktop buckles the first time a dump truck stops there during a hot day.
I rented the truck in the South Hills, which means I had to traverse that section of pavement twice on my way to and from Our Fair City. Vikings on long boats in heavy gales have braved smoother seas. In fact, on every pavement joint, the truck jounced and bounced like a pogo stick. No doubt we would have gotten nauseous after a while; luckily, we were soon light-headed from the clouds of unburned, vaporized diesel fuel that were spraying out from under the hood.
We soon found out where the diesel vapors were coming from; a cracked fuel line was leaving puddles of fuel on the ground whenever we stopped. Basically, it wasn't a moving van so much as a rolling EPA Superfund site.
If you rent a truck, make sure you return it with the same amount of fuel with which you left. Otherwise, the rental company charges you $2 per gallon to refill the tank. That's one of the thousands of interesting items in a thick booklet that you're given when they present you with the keys. "WARNING: MAKE SURE YOU READ THIS INSTRUCTION MANUAL THOROUGHLY AND UNDERSTAND IT BEFORE USING THIS TRUCK," it says in big, threatening letters on the cover. Nuclear submarines come with less detailed manuals. I decided to save the manual for later, so I'd have something to read at the emergency room.
Speaking of diesel fuel, did you know that there's no place to purchase it in Our Fair City, except at the Buy 'n Fly on Walnut Street? Neither did I.
Between the smoke coming from the back of the truck and the diesel fuel spraying from the front, you might wonder if we worried about a fire. At first I was worried that it might burst into flame while my stuff was loaded inside. Then, after seeing my wretched life in the sunlight, I was worried that the truck wouldn't burst into flame until after it was unloaded.
Perhaps you wonder if the truck was noisy. No more so than a battleship going over Niagara Falls. After a while, your eardrums go numb and you don't notice.
When I coaxed the van back to the rental agency at the end of the day, I pointed out to the rental clerk that the truck was leaking fuel. "Huh, how about that," he said, looking at the puddle on the ground. I suppose I should have considered myself lucky: Another clerk was on the phone with a lady who had broken down on a highway somewhere. Her truck had been towed by the police impound driver --- with her stuff inside.
In conclusion, the upside of renting trucks: The chance to bounce down the street in a smelly, smoky, noisy vehicle, ignoring traffic etiquette and endangering the people around you, without having to go through the trouble of building a street rod in your backyard. Also, they're cheap.
The downside? The combination of noise, vibration and pollution exposure probably takes years off of your life.
However, as some wag once pointed out, those are the years at the end of your life, and they usually stink anyway.
Short entry for today; I was moving things and couldn't get to a computer.
All in all, it was an excellent weekend for Sunday newspapers in Pittsburgh. The Tribune-Review has had one of the lamest funnies pages in the market for a long time. So imagine my surprise on Sunday when the Trib added 13 --- count 'em --- 13 new comic strips, including two of my favorites, Get Fuzzy and Pearls Before Swine.
Bill Loeffler's story also includes a great capsule history of American newspaper comic strips, and quotes from several cartoonists.
I'd call that a powerful shot across the bow of the guys on the Boulevard of the Allies, and the capture of funnies supremacy in Pittsburgh in one fell swoop (or is that one swell foop?) by the Trib.
(Well, at least I'd call it that, but I'm a dimwit.)
Combine that with Gerry DeFlitch's downright excellent article on local, small-town radio in Western Pennsylvania (it ran in the Greensburg edition of the Trib; I don't know if it made the Pittsburgh editions) and a big "huzzah" is in order for the Tribune-Review.
The Post-Gazette, meanwhile, had a good historical overview of why Allegheny County ended up with 130 municipalities, including capsule histories of the towns. Some highlights from the Mon-Yough area:
--- East McKeesport was originally known by the native American name "Scanderoon" when the first settlers purchased the property there in 1804.
--- To give you an idea of how big Allegheny County's original townships were, West Elizabeth was originally part of Mifflin Township (which became West Mifflin Borough). The town was first established in 1833.
--- The first post office in Western Pennsylvania was established in 1832 at Turtle Creek.
--- Munhall was named for early settler John Munhall, who owned a farm in the area; he came from Ireland, however, with the name Mulhall.
--- One of the plainest municipal names in the Mon-Yough area --- Forward Township --- also has one of the strangest backgrounds. The township was named for Walter Forward, a prominent Pittsburgh judge and politician. In 1869, the state General Assembly approved the sectioning of Elizabeth Township into four smaller townships, including what eventually became Forward. When residents couldn't agree on a name, the courts named the township for Forward --- who had no known connection to the municipality.
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