FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
A 53-year-old North Versailles Township man was arrested today after police say he exhibited insufficient Steeler fandom.
Armed with arrest and search warrants, state police and agents from the Department of Steeler Nation Security arrested Joseph A. Stushkowski at his Greensburg Avenue home. Police said that when he was apprehended, he was peeling potatoes on top of last Sunday's special Post-Gazette section about the Steelers.
Stushkowski was arraigned at the Heinz Field Great Hall by U.S. Senior District Judge Charles H. Noll on charges of failure to purchase, consume or transport Steeler merchandise; attempted ignorance of the over-under; and possession of non-football-related library books with intent to read them.
He was released after posting 50 quarts of Hagan Steelers Sundae Ice Cream as bond. A hearing has not yet been set.
The arrest comes on the eve of Saturday's match-up between the Steelers and the New York Jets, and follows a series of highly-publicized raids on Steeler Sundays at bookstores, art museums and the Pittsburgh Zoo, where officials allege people were "flagrantly ignoring" football games.
John Fedko, chief prosecutor for the Department of Steeler Nation Security for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said agents received an anonymous tip that Stushkowski had failed to wear Steelers garb today, which was officially declared "Black and Gold Day" by Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy.
According to court documents, further investigation revealed that he had been known to go grocery shopping or set up appointments on Sundays in the fall and winter without ever considering whether the Steelers were playing.
Today's raid on the suspect's home uncovered no evidence of Steelers jerseys, caps, commemorative beer cans or foam hats, Fedko said.
"And yet we did find a hat from the Hamilton Tiger-Cats," he said. "Canadian football. It's almost as if he was mocking us."
Neighbors said they had been suspicious of Stushkowski's level of Steelers fandom for months.
"He doesn't even fly a black and gold Steelers flag on his house," said Wilson Spaulding, who lives nearby. "Just that American one. And yinz mean to tell me that he can't even bother to wear a Steelers tassle cap in the wintertime?"
Spaulding, clad in an authentic Jerome Bettis jersey, pointed to evidence of Steeler fandom at other houses on the street, including bedsheets with spray-painted "7"'s that flapped from several windows.
"You can see it doesn't take much, so there's no excuse," Spaulding said. "Between these miniature Steelers helmet twinkle lights, the flag, the inflatable Steeler player, the black and gold artificial flowers and the canvas banners, I've probably only spent a few thousand dollars."
Stushkowski's attorney, Clifford Stoudt of Columbus, Ohio, said his client's commitment to the Steelers is "unquestionable."
"He listens to all of the Steelers games on the radio, owns several of Jim O'Brien's books, an authentic cork bulletin board silk screened with the statistics of the Steelers' 1978 championship season, and an original yellow on white 'Terrible Towel' purchased by his father at Gimbels' Eastland store," Stoudt said. "I call that long-term loyalty."
But prosecutors and legal experts said that Steelers nostalgia is not enough.
"This is a new team, a new time," said Mark Madden, who holds the Pittsburgh Brewing Co. chair in the Department of Steelermania at Robert Morris University. "This is a chance for a new generation to cheer for new heroes."
The Department of Steeler Nation Security, or Stenatsec, was formed after radical cowboys from Dallas, Texas, launched terrorist attacks against Steeler Nation on Jan. 28, 1996.
Comprised of a merger between Franco's Italian Army, Gerela's Gorillas, Frenchy's Foreign Legion and Bradshaw's Brigade, the department has recently been criticized for alleged abuse of prisoners, including reports that detainees have been forced to listen to The Fan Club's rendition of "Here We Go Steelers" for up to 24 hours straight.
Yet prosecutors say drastic measures are necessary to prevent other forms of sports fandom from overtaking Steelermania. According to declassified intelligence reports from field agents of Stenatsec, there remain pockets of football resistance in Western Pennsylvania, where fans hold out for baseball and basketball, and even soccer and hockey.
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To Do This Weekend: You may have heard rumors about a football game Saturday. Don't become the next statistic.
I worked at the library all through high school and college.
(Dork! Dork! Excuse me, I have a "dork" caught in my throat. Please, continue.)
As I was saying, I worked at the library all through high school and college. By my senior year of college, I had worked my way up to complete obscurity as a supervisor, which meant that I had a key to the building, oversaw several work-study students, and had the power to ... oh, I don't know. Turn the lights on and off.
(Wow! So you were head dork?)
Quiet, you.
Library work suits my temperament well, but as the building supervisor at night, I was a terror. I lacked only the brown shirt, the peaked cap, the plus-fours tucked into my jackboots, and the swagger stick to complete the picture. "Conan the Librarian," they called me.
No, not really. But actually, we all took our duties very seriously, as only a $5.75 per hour undergraduate with a badge can take them. By God, we were going to be efficient!
Leave your cell phone or purse unattended while you went to the bathroom, and you could expect to find one of campus police's official warning cards when you returned: "GUARD YOUR POSSESSIONS! A THIEF CAN STEAL YOUR VALUABLES AS EASILY AS WE LEFT THIS CARD." Talk too loudly, and we'd be around to hush you.
So you're a faculty member and you need this book for a class? Well, too bad, professor deadbeat! Return the 400 books you already have checked out, and maybe we'll consider it. And when the library was closing, that meant we were closing, buster. The fact that you had a term paper due the next day did not bother us in the least. Scram, you derelict!
If only there hadn't been so many books around, we could have turned the fire hose on people. (We didn't allow dogs in the library, except seeing-eye dogs, so releasing the hounds wasn't an option.)
When the Internet was new, we'd occasionally get some pervert surfing porn on a public computer; if he (it was always a "he") was doing more than just looking, we called the cops. (I wasn't about to touch them --- would you?)
We heard stories from other academic libraries where people were caught doing the nasty in the stacks, but that never happened while I was on the beat. Of course, that's not to say that some people weren't getting a little bit too involved in the Kama Sutra, if you know what I mean, but I never saw it.
The absolute big kahuna drive-us-up-the-wall library violation was eating and drinking. Some people would go through elaborate ruses to sneak food or beverages into the building, and would demurely sip from a water bottle concealed in their purses, or snack from a bag of candy.
Others would just load a backpack up with chips, pretzels, salads, sandwiches, pop, watermelon, hibachis, shish kebabs, popcorn poppers, picnic blankets and maybe even volleyball nets, and go to town. Once in a while, I'd find someone upstairs; with one hand, they would be paging through a rare 19th century volume of full-color plates depicting great Italian renaissance paintings; and with the other, they would be eating a meatball hoagie with extra sauce.
Did you ever see a cartoon where a character turned red, and steam whistles sprouted from their ears?
Yeah, our reactions were something like that.
So imagine my reaction when I finally made it over to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's main branch this week, and goggled at the first floor. They're serving coffee and pastries there. In a library. With books nearby! They have big comfy chairs to encourage you to spend time hanging out and reading. You can even eat while you read. While you read, people!
And when it's time to check out a book, you go to a checkout aisle near the front entrance, and they hand you a little receipt at the end of the transaction.
What's next? Shopping carts? A tire center? Dogs and cats, living together?
It's part of the library's effort to become more friendly to consumers. The Carnegie Library's remodeling effort was based on the look of retail bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, which feature restaurants and areas to browse. The place was busy on a weeknight, and not just with the usual crowd of the elderly, perverts and school kids, so the changes must be having some effect.
Change is good, but it will take me some time to get used to this new attitude of permissiveness. I just hope the Carnegie Library draws the line someplace.
If any of the librarians read this, let me issue this warning: If you see someone taking a six-pack of malt liquor, a blanket and a box of prophylactics back to the area where you keep the Kama Sutra, don't wait to act until it's too late.
And if you aren't sure what to do, call me; somewhere, I might still have some of those little warning cards from campus police.
Good lord. Some people wonder why newspaper circulation is dropping. Not me: Just look at the horrible photo --- in full color, yet --- that's on the front page of the Post-Gazette's South edition today.
It's not on the Web yet, thank God, so there may be time to shield your loved ones --- or in some cases, your wives and children.
Personally, I'm taking the rest of the day off; in fact, I think I might be sick. Did anyone really need to see something like that when they were trying to eat breakfast?
UPDATE: Sweet baby Jebus. Apparently, they are allowed to put things like this online. Alert the Department of Total Information Awareness. Notice the subject is caught in a rare moment: With his mouth closed. Story here.
In response to yesterday's Almanac, an Alert Reader points out in the comments: "(What) used to be Sleep Mart is going out of business everywhere, at least judging from their signage and radio commercials. So, I guess, Tony's had it."
I'll throw in this for free: (Rimshot).
If Sleep Mart is truly folding up its tents, then "Tony's Got It" is yet another example of a clever advertising campaign that was an absolute failure at moving products.
Every ad had those annoying people saying "Tony's Got It! Tony's Got It! Tony's Got It!" until the phrase was embedded in our brains. But they barely mentioned what the real name of the stores was --- "Sleep Mart" --- nor did they emphasize what the stores sold --- namely, mattresses and bedding.
You may have also seen the commercials for AFLAC that feature Gilbert Gottfried returning the corporate spokesduck to the pet store. According to The Wall Street Journal, while the duck commercials have taken AFLAC's name recognition from 12 percent to 90 percent, most of the people who saw the ads still had no idea what the company sold.
For the record: AFLAC sells supplemental insurance for long-term care, or for people who might go on long-term disability after an illness or injury.
Now, if only Tony could have gotten together with a duck, and maybe the gecko from Geico, we might have been able to create commercials so horrifying that Alberto Gonzales wouldn't even allow them to be shown to prisoners.
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After a hiatus of several months, Christopher Livingston's "Not My Desk" is back in business (sort of) at http://www.notmydesk.com/blog/.
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"Detroitblog" blows the lid off of the life of a newspaper reporter while attending the North American International Auto Show in his fair city:
Really, as with most press days everywhere, the main appeal for people like me (press types) is the freebies --- the cocktails, the appetizers, the free lunches and dinners, the gimmicky toy giveaways, and the lovely models --- have I mentioned the models? Events like this are the one thing for journalists that almost makes up for the crappy pay, the bad hours, the large number of demented and emotionally disturbed coworkers drawn to this profession, and the utter lack of job security. So if it sounds privileged, it’s really basically a matter of “Well, you might not have a job next week, but here’s a free sandwich and a beer.”
In October, the Cleveland Clinic was the first institution to receive approval from its institutional review board to perform human facial tissue transplantation --- face transplants --- on severely disfigured patients. And doctors in Louisville, Ky. published an article in the American Journal of Bioethics last fall announcing their intention to move face transplants from the realm of speculation to clinical trials.
Alert Reader Officer Jim wrote in to take note of the helpful new reminders erected (presumably) by PennDOT and the Allegheny County DPW:
Have you happened through White Oak recently? At the intersection of Route 48 and Lincoln Way there are very large signs informing all that they are at the intersection of Lincoln Way and Jacks Run Road. Have I missed something? I usually miss a lot, but I thought it was still Long Run Road.
They are indeed large. Large enough to be read from a low-flying airplane, I suspect, and well out of scale with the rest of the intersection. My tax dollars at work.
The flipside, of course, is that highway signs can be too small. I was in Perryopolis over the weekend and came out of a side street looking for Route 51. Instead of the normal Pennsylvania highway "keystone" shields there was a tiny street sign on a telephone pole, like you'd use in a subdivision: "RT 51."
Other signs that caught my attention --- but which I didn't have time to photograph --- included a "Sinclair" gas station sign somewhere between Connellsville and Perryopolis, more than 30 years after Sinclair stopped selling gasoline in Pennsylvania. Dino still held his head high after all of these years, and why shouldn't he? There wasn't a speck of rust on him, as far as I could tell.
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I had an appointment Sunday morning in Downtown Pittsburgh (you know, that place a few miles north of Our Fair City). Other than a handful of skaters using the ice rink at PPG Place, some derelicts, and a few people working in fast-food restaurants, I had an area of several blocks around Market Square to myself.
The old Murphy's store is a sad shell of its former self. The sight of it would be enough to make a Murphy man cry. W.C. Shaw and J.S. Mack would spit nails if they saw the flagship of the chain abandoned like that.
But the nearby buildings aren't much better. Someone had chucked a brick through one of the plate glass windows of the old Lerner Shops, and glass still littered the pavement at lunchtime Sunday. The first floor of what was The Bank Center complex is occupied by a "dollar discount" store. Several merchants had piled big stacks of garbage out for collection, but it wasn't clear when collection was going to happen, because the trash had obviously been picked through by the homeless, and scraps of it were blowing into the street.
The shiny new Lazarus store lacks only big floppy ears and a tail to make it look completely like a white elephant, and the busiest people downtown seem to be the graffiti "artists"; I could actually smell fresh spray paint in a couple of alleyways, although I didn't see anyone actually tagging.
A block or so away, I saw parents unloading cars as students at Point Park University returned to the dorms. I can't imagine what moms and dads think about the appearance of Downtown Pittsburgh, and I wonder how many of them arrive in town for a campus visit, turn the car around, and drive away.
An acquaintance who worked in Downtown Our Fair City in the 1970s and '80s, and who works in Downtown Pittsburgh now, says he's starting to get the same feeling walking on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh as he used to get walking on Fifth Avenue in Our Fair City --- that of a business district in free-fall.
I don't care to speculate on who the next mayor of Picksberg will be. Frankly, I don't have a dog in the fight. But whoever it is will have to stop chasing the fantasy that high-bucks retailers are going to return to the Golden Triangle, and quit building multi-million dollar attractions which stand empty or mostly empty for weeks at a time, like stadia and convention centers.
Instead, the focus should be on creating affordable housing for both young marrieds and retired couples. Get people living Dahntahn --- besides the people sleeping on steam grates, that is --- and I suspect retail and entertainment will follow, organically, and funded by the private sector. Putting some free parking around would help, too (I know, I'm living in a fantasy land).
Oh, and pick up the trash on the weekends, for cripes' sakes. If I want to see corridors filled with piles of old clothes, paper goods and other junk, I'll visit my basement.
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Alert Reader Arden reports that the Los Angeles Times has finally yanked the spectacularly unfunny comic strip "Garfield" from its pages. (He's fat! He hates Mondays! He eats lasagna! Laughing yet?)
According to Editor & Publisher, the Times is trying to "get some new talent" in the comics pages.
Bully for them. I hope they don't cave into complaints, though I some how suspect they will. Next, can someone take "Marmaduke" to the vet and put him out of his (and our) misery?
You know what the joke is in "Marmaduke"? He's a big dog! Hilarity ensues!
Writes Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune, "I only wish we ran the non-adventures of that charmless cat so we could yank the strip, too. What's your least favorite daily strip in the Tribune? ... Me, I can't decide between 'Hagar the Horrible' and 'Broom-Hilda.'"
Oh, Lord, he's right. Those are worse. Don't even get me started on them.
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Signs along Route 30 in North Huntingdon Township indicate that the Sleep Mart location next to Hamilton Buick is closing. Does this mean that Tony doesn't got it?
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