I want to apologize to everyone this week on whom I've been inflicting references to Guy Caballero, Count Floyd, Johnny La Rue, Edith Prickley, Lola Heatherington and others. In fact, I'd just like to say that I apologize to everyone who ever knew me, or met me, or wanted to meet me.
Whoops! There I go again. Well, I'm sorry about that, but what would you rather have, this Web page or soccer? Hours and hours of soccer? Liverpool versus Hampshire. Some guy bouncing a ball off of his head.
Darn! I did it again.
Well, I have an explanation. Recently, I did something I swore I'd never do: I bought a DVD set of an old television show. My feeling is, why buy a box set of "M*A*S*H" or "I Love Lucy" or "The Simpsons" when those shows air for free over and over and over again?
But in this case, the show I bought hasn't been seen on TV much at all since its original run ended 20 years ago ... and wasn't seen that much, frankly, in the first place. It's "SCTV," the low-budget syndicated parody of network television, filmed in Canada by some very talented comedians from The Second City improv troupe in Toronto. It had a brief run on NBC and Cinemax before sinking beneath the waves.
My love of "SCTV" is such that I bought the box set --- nine episodes from the start of the NBC run, plus interviews with the cast --- even though I gave away my DVD player some time ago. Last week, as a reward to myself for getting the new house settled (somewhat), I went to Sears and bought a no-frills DVD player, and I've been working my way through the box set, trying to pace myself, one episode at a time.
It hasn't been easy. I first saw "SCTV" during a family vacation to Niagara Falls. I had to be about 9 years old. It was a episode in which the ghosts of old television shows haunt SCTV, a fictional, low-budget television network somewhere out in the prairies of Canada (in reality, the series was mostly filmed at an independent station in Edmonton, Alberta). I didn't even get many of the references in the episode, but it was just bizarre, compelling, and funny.
I remember being particularly a little chilled by the closing scene, in which the voice of Jackie Gleason --- played by John Candy --- emanates from a discarded TV tube in a garbage can. A quick search of one of the many, many Web sites devoted to "SCTV" reveals that this episode was called "Sweeps Week," and originally aired in 1983. It also won an Emmy for best writing, and was nominated for two others.
For several years after, I would sneak out at 2 or 3 a.m. to catch SCTV reruns that aired on WPGH. I had to watch with the volume turned down really, really low to keep from waking my parents. (Note to any of my elementary school and junior high teachers who might read this: Now you know why I seemed so tired Tuesday through Friday mornings.)
Anyway, I was reluctant to order the DVDs in part because I was worried that the show wouldn't hold up. I used to like a lot of things when I was 12 years old ... BMX bikes, Chevy Monte Carlos, classic rock ... what if "SCTV" turned out to be not as good as I remembered?
I shouldn't have worried. If anything, it's better, because I understand the cultural references now.
Don't be mistaken: "SCTV" is an acquired taste, its ratings were abysmally low, and it had difficulty getting distribution. The sets are cheap and flimsy, and the makeup is nearly amateurish in some cases --- it's nowhere near the productions standards that even "Saturday Night Live" had during the late '70s.
But if you can stick with "SCTV," you'll find it much more nuanced than "SNL," and it takes on much more obscure targets --- Swedish films, Canadian quiz shows and O. Henry short stories were all subjects of "SCTV" parodies, for cripes sakes! --- and trusts the audience to be smart enough to get the jokes (or at least tolerant enough to play along).
The fictional SCTV network depended heavily on cheap made-for-TV knockoffs of popular movies; thus "Chinatown" became "Polynesiantown" (remember when Polynesian and Hawaiian cuisine was popular?) and the Jason Robards comedy "Melvin and Howard" became "Melvin and Howards" --- in which besides Howard Hughes, milkman Melvin Dummar also gives a ride to Howard Cosell, Howard Baker and Curly Howard of the Three Stooges.
Some of the stuff requires a heavy knowledge of '70s and '80s pop culture: Rick Moranis' running character of Gerry Todd, the music video disc jockey, is much funnier when you know that music videos barely existed then, and that MTV wouldn't go on the air for another three years. You have to remember smarmy '70s talk shows like those hosted by Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas to appreciate the swingin' hipsters on SCTV's "The Sammy Maudlin Show."
Perhaps because the budget was so tight, unlike "SNL," "SCTV" didn't specialize in celebrity impersonations, though the ones that did appear were dynamite. Dave Thomas' Bob Hope is incredible, and Moranis' Woody Allen is frighteningly accurate. (The two team up for an "SCTV" take off of Allen's "Play it Again, Sam" in "Play it Again, Bob," which also features Joe Flaherty as Bing Crosby.) This DVD doesn't include Eugene Levy's deadpan Perry Como, singing the hits while lying on a couch, barely conscious. But it does have John Candy's Orson Welles, doing a Christmas special with Dave Thomas' Liberace. It has to be seen to be believed.
For Pittsburghers, an added treat is watching for the Western Pennsylvania references that Joe Flaherty and his brother, Paul, were constantly sneaking into the scripts, like this station ID: "This is the SCTV Television Network ... Channel 3 in Pittsburgh, Cable 102 in Blawnox." At one point, horror movie host Count Floyd introduces a movie called "Blood-Sucking Monkeys from West Mifflin, Pennsylvania," only to find out that SCTV doesn't have the film.
In fact, Flaherty has freely admitted that the Count Floyd character and his show, "Monster Chiller Horror Theater," were spoofs of erstwhile Channel 11 weatherman and announcer "Chilly" Bill Cardille, and his late-night horror movie show, "Chiller Theater." (Like Cardille in real life, the fictional Count Floyd had to pull other shifts around the station; he was the co-anchor of the SCTV News.)
Watching "SCTV" is a little bittersweet, too. These are talented folks, but for some of them, "SCTV" was the highlight of their careers. Dave Thomas hasn't done much other than a recurring role on the so-so sitcom "Grace Under Fire." Catherine O'Hara --- now 50 but still a knockout --- is doing bit parts and voices for cartoons. (Her biggest role post-"SCTV" was probably as the mother in "Beetlejuice.") Rick Moranis seems to be typecast as a nebbish in family films.
Others have done better; Gene Levy is in demand for character roles. Andrea Martin is doing voiceovers and stage work. Only two "SCTV" stars went on to have big careers, by Hollywood standards --- Martin Short and John Candy --- and Candy's career was very uneven. For every light classic that he did, like "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," "Only the Lonely" and the under-appreciated "Delirious," he turned out an execrable piece of garbage like "Wagons East," his last film. It's also sad to watch Candy knowing that he's now been dead for 10 years.
But over all, I have to say that the first "SCTV" box set was a good five dollars' worth of entertainment for me and my whole family, eh? I can barely wait for Volume 2, even if no one gets blowed up real good.
...
In other stories, demolition derby is all fun and games until someone gets T-boned in a Plymouth Horizon, reports Rebekah Scott in the Post-Gazette:
Ambulances stand by at each event, and officials stop all action when a driver is hurt. If he's knocked unconscious, they summon a medical helicopter, said Chairman Chuck Sheffler. Each car is inspected before the race to ensure it's reinforced or cut apart at appropriate spots for fire-dousing and driver safety. Harnesses, seat belts and helmets are required at each race, but injuries aren't unheard of.
At a late July race in New Alexandria, as firefighters cut drivers out of their smashed-together pickups, the track announcer reassured the crowd that the injuries are "nothing out of the ordinary. We Life Flight somebody out of here every few weeks, and they're back up and out here again in time for the championships."
Olson said regulating the sport might spoil the fun, or even eliminate the races altogether.
I used to cover Wall (population 727) for The Daily News and the Trib. When I started to attend borough council meetings, some of the officials were taken aback --- no one had paid any attention to them for years --- but very friendly and accommodating. (One official in a neighboring community complained because I was writing stories about Wall. "Who cares about them?" he asked me. "People who live there," I said. "Besides, they pay 35 cents for their paper, just like you do.")
Anyway, Susan Schmeichel of the Trib has been paying attention, too: She reports that Wall is about to celebrate its centennial with a street fair Sept. 25.
I guess that will include events at the Wall Municipal Building, also known as the Wall Hall. There's going to be a musical guest at the Wall Centennial; sadly, it isn't Diana Krall, although Diana Krall at the Wall Hall in the Fall would be a ball (I think Krall is a doll, even in Wall), because Wall Hall is nice in the Fall, though if it's cold, wear a shawl.
Now, if they ever build a mall behind the Wall Hall, it would be the Wall Hall Mall. Unfortunately, traffic would stall to a crawl.
If Wall ever got into a war with Wilmerding, they'd have to build a protective barrier: Would it be the Great Wall of Wall?
OK, I'll stop.
...
Except that I always wondered what would have happened if Wall and Wilmerding had merged. Would the new town be "Wallmerding"?
I was partial to "Wilmerwall," myself.
...
Yesterday, I wrote about how Our Fair City has traditionally gone to great lengths to distance itself from Pittsburgh.
According to a visitor to the Pittsburgh Radio Nostalgia message board, known only as "KW," the anti-Pittsburgh sentiment even extended to one of Our Fair City's two radio stations, WMCK (which later became WIXZ and is now known as WPTT).
Despite a relatively poor signal, KW contends that WMCK had a chance (in those days before FM radio was prominent) to compete with Pittsburgh's Top 40 stations, especially KQV:
The 1958 version of the "Mighty 1360" did 'needle' KQV. It was programed by Legendary Dick Lawrence, and featured on-air talent including Jim White (KMOX), Lou Janis (KQV), Bill Lynch, Jay Morton, Herb Allen and ex-vaudavillian Pat Haley, who'd been the Program Manager at KDKA long before any of us were born. In addition, the station also boasted Cathy Milton. Overnights, the station used an 'automated' Seburg Juke Box, operated by the transmitter engineer, who would 'insert' jingles, spots etc. The overnight program had it's own jingle, "Nightwatch." The jocks at the stations used to promote it as "The Mechanical Monster." This "Mighty 1360" automated overnight far preceeded WHOT's automated "Big Al Knight Show."
According to what was related to me by Haley and Morton, orginally, Lawrence wanted to use the call letters WPGH, which having been abandoned by WILY/WEEP, were available. The local McKeesport merchants who, in 1958, owned the station would have none of that. So, Lawrence just called it "Mighty 1360," and used the "MCK" call letters, buried only in a legal ID jingle.
Alice Giles had always told her relatives, which include one surviving child, 17 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, that the one thing she wanted to do before she died was to ride on the back of a firetruck.
"They don't even let us do that anymore," said Chuck Cook, acting fire company president.
So riding in the front with driver Jim Smith was the next best thing.
Bob Dole's nasty swipe at John Kerry's war wounds this week made you understand why Viagra has been losing market share to Cialis. The sight of that bitter old face piling on to protest that Kerry did not bleed enough is instant detumescence.
Utne Reader, for the uninitiated, is the liberal analogue to Reader's Digest (an appropriate analogy, given RD's sometime penchant for right-wing pulpit pounding articles between "Laughter is the Best Medicine" and "Quotable Quotes"). It collects, digests and reprints articles from progressive, alternative and leftist magazines and newspapers about the environment, politics and culture. I buy Utne occasionally, but I get too darned many magazines --- from U.S. News and World Report to Cars & Parts --- so I've been trying to cut back to save money.
Consequently, I missed it when Utne excerpted an article about Eastland Mall from a magazine called Clamor.
I had never heard of Clamor; it turns out it's a bimonthly about politics and culture, published in Toledo. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in Oakland receives Clamor, so I went over on my lunch hour to check it out; naturally, the issue with the Eastland story (March-April 2004) was never received. And Clamor doesn't put their stories online.
Thus, I'm left to report on the Utne version of the story. I'm hoping the condensed version is accurate.
The article was written by Andy Cornell, who I can find next to nothing about through the normal database searches; I did find at least one other article on which he collaborated with a writer from Western Pennsylvania, so I'm assuming he might be a local guy.
Utne stories aren't available on the 'net to non-subscribers, so you'll have to take my word when I present these excerpts of Cornell's story. Here's his description of the Mon-Yough area:
This was coal country once. Working men and immigrant families, many having just stepped off the boat from Eastern Europe, flocked to southwestern Pennsylvania to blow the tops off of its wooded hills and scrape out the black gold inside. After that, it was steel country --- one of the most productive industrial areas in the United States for the first three-quarters of the 20th century. Now, in large part, this is retirement country. Temping country. SSI country, salesclerk country, flea market country.
Officially, the North Versailles mall is open for business, but visitors won't find much to buy. A Christian stationery store offers a variety of embossed birth and death announcements as well as some enameled plaques decorated with proverbs about walking on the beach with God. Further down the mall, it seems like the storefronts have been rented as warehouse rather than retail space.
Yesterday afternoon, I had to explain to a Picksberger what Renziehausen Park was. Is it like a conservation district? he asked.
No, I said. It's a big regional park in Our Fair City. It's got a bandshell, a fishing lake, softball and baseball fields, tennis courts, hiking and biking trails, the Heritage Center museum, and picnic groves. (I forgot to mention the Jacob Woll Pavilion, where the McKeesport Art Group holds its shows and where the Festival of Trees is held at Christmastime; I also forgot about the rose garden, maintained by the McKeesport Garden Club.)
It's kind of like a cut-down version of South Park (the park, not the TV show), I said.
Wow, he said. He didn't know anything like that existed.
I always enjoy bragging on Our Fair City, so it was nice to tell someone about one of its highlights.
Last night, while cleaning around the house, I heard a call come across the police scanner: Three people had just been wounded in a shooting in the Third Ward. Yikes.
Our Fair City has always fancied itself as a little version of Pittsburgh --- it was McKeesport politician and Daily News publisher W.D. Mansfield, after all, who helped block metropolitan government in the 1920s for fear that Our Fair City would lose its autonomy to Pittsburgh --- and has often duplicated things that were being done by its larger neighbor to the north. You have a symphony? We have a symphony. You have a housing authority? We have a housing authority.
McKeesport never went into Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, choosing to build its own water and sewerage treatment plants; until fairly recently, Carnegie Free Library of McKeesport patrons couldn't borrow books from Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and vice versa.
The merits of this feisty independence can be debated, of course. It was easy enough to make the books balance when 7,000 people worked at National Tube and thousands more worked for Firth-Sterling, Kelsey-Hayes, Peters Packing, G.C. Murphy Co. and all of the other companies that called Our Fair City home. If maintaining a separate sewer system was a little more expensive, well, it's only money. (And it kept lots of political operatives on the government payroll, too.)
In at least one way, Our Fair City is a lot like Picksberg. They have debt? We have debt. They have pockets of violent crime? We have pockets of violent crime. They have a population drain? We have a population drain.
Pittsburgh has some very nice neighborhoods, and some very bad ones. McKeesport has some very nice neighborhoods, and some very bad ones. And they're bad for the same reasons: Absentee landlords, too many social-service agencies concentrated in a small area, poverty and crime.
The problem is that Pittsburgh is a whole lot bigger than Our Fair City, so the decay is less evident. Someone who visited only Dahntahn Picksberg or Oakland or Shadyside wouldn't see the back side of East Liberty, for instance. This explains all of the glowing out-of-town press coverage that Pittsburgh has received recently; sure, if you only visited the Golden Triangle, you'd have no idea that people living out in the neighborhoods were frustrated and angry about abandoned buildings and lack of city services.
Whereas in McKeesport, you can't help but see the decline. I've become inured to it, I guess, but when I see it through someone else's eyes, I flinch. I stumbled onto a diary by a couple who rode their bikes from Washington, D.C., to the upper Midwest, passing through the Mon-Yough valley. If this doesn't make you cringe, you're not a McKeesporter:
McKeesport is a horribly dilapidated suburb of Pittsburgh --- when steel left and the malls were built in other towns, this place curled up and died. All it has now is a huge aging population who can't leave and a depressing low-income population.
Well, I have to admit that the world did not come to an end. It's so amazing how much better everything is with just a night's sleep. But there is no way in McKeesport (that's my new swear word --- "Go to McKeesport, you jerk. What the McKeesport? Oh, McKeesport!") that I am biking anywhere today.
(Editor's Note: There's something local at the end. Otherwise, this is another dispatch from the Tube City Almanac National Affairs Desk. If you're not interested in my tedious, namby-pamby politics, jump to the bottom.)
Still waters run deep out in Minnesota (get it? Stillwater? Ha ha), where the Gopher State's two best known humorists are taking shots at the current political climate.
In this corner, in the blue trunks, originally from Anoka, Minn., it's Garrison Keillor, the "Lake Wobegon Kid"! And in this corner, in the red trunks, from Fargo, N.D., but now hanging his hat in Minneapolis, it's "Boy Bleat," James Lileks!
OK, fellas, you know the drill: droll phrases; solemn profundities; dry, acerbic wit; and self-deprecation are all allowed. No hitting below the belt, and no clutching. Now, go back into your corners and come out writing!
(BONG!)
And Lileks comes out swinging that mean right cross, and he steadily pounds away at the big, fleshy middle in his syndicated column for Newhouse News Service:
Do you suffer from Sudden Bush Hatred Fatigue Syndrome? It's easy to diagnose. It often strikes at a bookstore. You walk in looking for a breezy summer read, and piled near the door are stacks and stacks of angry tomes about the perfidy of Usurper Bush. ....
It's hard to tell how SBHFS will affect the vote. This group could go either way. They could so weary of the incessant hysteria that they'll be willing to reward the frothers, if only to shut them up. If I vote for John Kerry, will you be happy? Will that do it? The answer would be Yes! That'll do it!
Well, that, and nationalized health care, tax hikes on small businesses, the Kyoto treaty, fealty to the United Nations, shipping nuclear fuel to the Iranians to make them act nice, leaving Iraq ASAP and ushering in what Kerry calls a more "sensitive" war on terrorism. (We will use marshmallow bullets, perhaps.) All that plus vast federally funded embryo farms, and they'll be happy. For a while. Then we'll have to do something about that "In God We Trust" nonsense on the coins.
Richard Nixon was a good deal responsible for the Environmental Protection Agency and the push to clean up the Great Lakes. The conservation movement that paved the way, so to speak, for the whole Green agenda was very much a Republican thing. The Americans With Disabilities Act, which gave us Handi-vans and wheelchair-accessible facilities and those little ramps carved into the curbs, was brought about by Republicans (and Democrats). Republicans have been good critics of government, and good satirists at times. Republican libertarianism is a useful antidote to our Democratic/neurotic tendency to want to put up a warning sign on uneven terrain and make cowboys do their whooping in designated whooping areas. Republicans used to contribute a lot, back before they let the fanatics and teeth grinders take over and turn their party into the Leave Me Alone party, intent on proving that government is inherently inept, and they've done such damage to America in the past decade that will take a century of saints to fix.
You wander over to periodicals and flip open the current Esquire. There's a story on stem-cell research. The author's subtitle: "How the president is trying to kill my daughter."
Yes, of course, you think. (How weary your inner voice sounds.) That's precisely what he is trying to do. That is the president's specific objective in life: Kill sick people. It makes him happy. Every night he puts his cloven hooves up on the desk and thinks of the people he's offed today. Ahh. Life is good.
President Bush was campaigning on Wednesday here in St. Paul and he sounded awfully loopy, like an old camp counselor who's done too many campfires. According to him, we're bringing democracy to the Middle East and the economy is turning the corner. He said it about 10 times, in those tiny mincing sentences of his, and there isn't anybody over the age of 12 who really believes him.
Without concessions from its employees within the next month, the airline's chairman said last week, the company could be liquidated and its assets sold. A couple of days later, the airline's chief executive officer said bankruptcy is a possibility, but not "an imminent shutdown, a disruption of service or impending liquidation."
And today, the airline is expected to announce its expansion in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
"One minute we're going out of business. The next minute we're expanding in Fort Lauderdale," said Teddy Xidas, president of the Pittsburgh local of the Association of Flight Attendants. ...
"If you're looking to terminate pension plans and freeze pension payments, where do you get the money to expand? I don't understand it. It's so confusing to the employees."
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