Got a haircut the other day, and the price has jumped another dollar. This is really starting to bug me, too, although I didn't tell the barber that. (Never argue with a guy holding a straight razor, that's my credo.)
I still don't understand why I should pay 100 percent of the price, when I don't have 100 percent of the hair. If you were paying someone to cut your lawn, and your lawn was only half the size of your neighbor's lawn, would you expect to pay the same price as they pay? Of course not.
So, hair was on my mind --- which means, I guess, that those few remaining hairs have deep roots --- when I saw what Harry Shearer (whose name has never been more appropriate) wrote at Talking Points Memo the other day in regard to the departure of CBS Evening News anchor "Gunga" Dan Rather:
I’m amazed that a salient fact about Dan’s last few years escaped notice during last week’s barrage of Rathermania and Ratherphobia. Namely, what other distinguished personage of such lengthy service in the public eye suddenly decides, in the last few years of his career, to change the side of his head on which he parts his hair? That, my friends, is plain weird .... Somehow, Dan decided ... that the twilight of a long life on camera had to be marked with a migratory part. And nobody asked why.
Shearer (who has a terrific radio show heard locally Monday mornings at 12 a.m. on WDUQ) goes on to link to something called the Hair Part Theory. Simply stated, this theory (developed by a man in Syracuse, N.Y.) states that:
A left hair part draws unconscious attention to the left side of the brain, which controls activities traditionally associated with masculinity. A right hair part draws unconscious attention to the right side of the brain, which controls activities traditionally associated with femininity. ...
Only 7 percent of presidents had a definite right part. Only 16 percent of the male governors in office as of last September had a definite right part. Only 13 percent of the male senators and 16.4 percent of representatives in the last session of Congress had right parts.
Parting my hair, admittedly, is like trying to water ski on the Youghiogheny River. It can be done, but there isn't much surface material to work with and there's precious little margin for experimentation. Nevertheless, I've been parting my hair on the right for years now, which could explain my meteoric rise to mediocrity.
So, Dr. Pica Pole, director of the Tube City Online Laboratory (motto: "We can fix it, or we can fix it so no one else can") decided to round up photos of a few local personages of note and see where they part their hair.
Left Part
As you can see, the left part goes across local, state and federal political boundaries, and across ideological lines. Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy, a Democrat (1); U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, a Republican (2); and Governor Ed Rendell (3), a Democrat, all have left parts, and have achieved notable political successes. But the left part is no guarantee of success in an election, as the erstwhile Fox Chapel resident pictured in (4) proved last November. Dr. Pole couldn't find a photo of Mayor James Brewster of Our Fair City, but I met him years ago, and I seem to recall that he parts his hair on the left, too. (Photo credits: City of Pittsburgh, United States Senate, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States Senate.)
Right Part
But wait! A right part is not necessarily harmful to one's career in politics, as photos of former Allegheny County Executive Jim Roddey (5) and current Allegheny County Council President Rich Fitzgerald (6), who represents the Steel Valley, would appear to indicate. As in the first set of photos, the right part is also bi-part-isan; Roddey is a Republican, while Fitzgerald is a Democrat. Also, Dr. Pole disputes the notion that a right part some how emphasizes a man's "feminine side," because anyone calling Steelers Coach Bill Cowher (7) "feminine" would do so at their own peril. I agree. (Photo credits: County of Allegheny and Pittsburgh Steelers.)
No Part
Also, the Hair Part Theory provides no means to evaluate those people who have no discernible part, and yet there is no shortage of local personalities of note who fall into that category. Dr. Pole turned up two prime examples: Current Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato (8) and ... well, does the fellow on the right (9) need any introduction? (Photo credits: County of Allegheny and Mario Lemieux Foundation.)
Obviously, the Hair Part Theory requires considerably more study, and if there are any foundations who want to make a large cash grant, Dr. Pole will be glad to set the entire vast research and development arm of Tube City Online to work on the problem. (Please, send only small, non-sequential bills, and no worthless checks.)
Unlike Dr. Pole, I didn't need to do any research. I needed to check only one man --- a man who has come to symbolize all that is great and distinctive about science, culture and commerce in Western Pennsylvania to me and to many others.
As you can see, Joe DeNardo (10) parts his hair on the left. Though Dr. Pole's research is not conclusive, that's a pretty strong endorsement of the left part. (Photo credit: WTAE-TV.)
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Worth Noting in the News: Ann Belser of the Post-Gazette had a nice article for St. Patrick's Day about the long-running "Echoes of Erin" program on WEDO (810). (Belser calls it "White Oak's" WEDO, which is sort of true. WEDO's studios are in White Oak, and the transmitter is in North Versailles, but the station is licensed to Our Fair City. Welcome to the world of FCC deregulation.)
Pat Cloonan of the News reported that $7 million for construction of overpasses into the RIDC industrial parks in Our Fair City and Duquesne has been included in the latest U.S. House surface transportation bill. Currently, access to the parks is restricted by the railroad tracks that separate the McKeesport and Duquesne sites from Lysle Boulevard and Route 837, respectively. It remains to be seen if the bill will pass the Senate.
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To Do This Weekend: McKeesport Area High School presents "Grease," through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in the high school auditorium, Eden Park Boulevard. Tickets are $5. ... South Allegheny High School presents "Honk," through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the auditorium at the high school, 2743 Washington Blvd., Liberty Borough. Tickets are $7. ... An Easter egg hunt will be held tomorrow morning beginning at 11 at Renzie Park. Call (412) 675-5020.
The hills above Our Fair City were alive this morning with the sound of chirping birds. The swallows return to San Juan Capistrano, and the spatsies return to North Bittyburg, I guess. I even heard a hoot owl last night: "Whoo! Whoo!" Who? Me, that's who.
I suppose we could still get a big snowstorm, but the National Weather Service is saying that temperatures should remain in the 40s and 50s through the next week or so, and the only precipitation expected is rain. We ought to be seeing some blossoms on the trees soon --- I haven't seen any yet, but I haven't really been looking, either.
I don't mind winter that much, mostly because I'm not a summery-type person. I'm not interested in hanging out on the beach or playing softball; sitting on the porch with a beer is more my speed. I also can't stand bugs (as far as I know, they're no big fan of mine, either), and winter is notable for its near total lack of them. The return of the birds --- which I enjoy --- means the imminent return of flies, fleas, mosquitos and assorted other pests.
Also, while the winter may be cold, you can always put on more clothes. Come August, when the temperature and the humidity are both hovering in the 90s, and my shirt is clinging to me like a wet rag, I'll be looking at Alaska travel brochures again with wistful longing. I much prefer fall --- baseball playoffs, cool nights, the sweet smell of falling leaves.
Still, the gray griminess of winter gets to me after a while, and spring is most welcome. Rain washes away the dirt and dust that settles on everything, and without rain, everything around the Mon-Yough area seems to take on a pallor in the wintertime. The tons of rock salt and cinders that road crews spread only accentuate the crud with a fine white layer of powder that really brings out the highlights of the ugliness. In some parts of the country, where the snow tends to stick around, the crumminess of winter isn't so noticeable, but Southwestern Pennsylvania doesn't get quite enough snow to hide the grit.
Then, too, by March in the Valley, people have started to forget what colors look like --- everything is in muted shades of brown, tan, beige and gray, with salt and cinder accents. Sure, people put bright red and green decorations out at Christmastime (sorry, at Christmakwanukah), but those colors are so artificial that they don't count. Besides, after a week or two they're buried under a thin coating of crud like everything else. While the first redbird or tulip that makes an appearance in March almost hurts your eyes, it's the good kind of hurt.
So here's to birds singing outside my window, to trying to get the lawnmower started, to Easter baskets, to taking the snow tires off the car, and to bringing in the storm windows and hanging the screens. Plus, Pirates' opening day is only 18 days away, and you know what that means: It's the last time this season that the Buccos won't have a losing record.
Because let's face it: I'm happy about spring's imminent arrival, but I'm not delusional.
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Update, 4 p.m.: Looks like reports of Mike Madison's departure were a hoax. Professor Pittsblog is emphatically not leaving. Someone appears to be having a little fun at his expense, which is pretty immature, but sadly, not unheard of:
In the comments to my last post (on the current production at the Jewish Theatre of Pittsburgh, which you all really should go see), someone posted a couple of comments under what purports to be my name. Allegedly, I'm moving back to California; I never really liked it here; sorry to the people I misled, etc.
Sorry to disappoint you, whoever you are, but I'm not moving back to California. I still do like Pittsburgh. And I intend to continue to do so, and say so, here.
What? Somebody wrote something on the Internet that wasn't true? But that's unpossible! Anyway, we apologize for falling for it. But still, I wouldn't blame Madison if he wanted to move to California, Pa. Seriously, 29 cent cheeseburgers at Pechin's are hard to beat.
An otherwise nice story in the Post-Gazette about H&H Fish Market --- a landmark in Our Fair City since the 1920s --- is somewhat spoiled by the very first sentence: "Tucked into a skinny storefront on a one-way side street in what's left of downtown McKeesport, in the shadow of the blue onion domes of Holy Virgin Dormition Russian Orthodox Church, is a shop straight out of the old days."
Gee, do we come to your town and remark on how crummy it is? Why must staff writers at the P-G continually reach for these easy cliches whenever they write about the Mon Valley? It's as if anything south of Hazelwood is forbidden territory for One of America's Great Newspapers --- they're like Lewis and Clark, meeting the natives for the first time.
A few years ago, the P-G did an entire series about canoeing down the Yough and "discovering" places like Sutersville and Whitsett. This line still sticks in my craw: "For much of this week, Annie and I have felt like a team from National Geographic, drifting through some exotic river region's spectacular scenery and distinctive culture."
Yes, you haven't lived until you've seen the aborigines of Buena Vista, running around bare-chested with bones in their noses, hunting tigers with spears and setting out on the Youghiogheny in their outriggers to dive for pearls. (Or are those Allegheny whitefish?)
In all seriousness, the profile of H&H is otherwise very nice, and frankly, since most stories from the Picksberg news media about the Mon-Yough area tend to focus on fires and shootings, it's very welcome.
But we're not savages, for crying out loud. We've got penicillin, flush toilets, telephones, cable TV and everything.
"What's left of downtown McKeesport," indeed. Been to downtown Picksberg lately?
(Update: I originally named the writer of the H&H and canoe trip pieces, and I then revised this entry to remove his name, because this isn't a personal attack on him --- it's just an observation on something I've noticed. He's otherwise a good writer, and for all I know, a very nice guy. We are a kinder, gentler blog.)
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Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune has a feature called "Fine Lines," in which he quotes great passages from stories in the news. I thought this paragraph by Karen Ferrick-Roman in the Beaver County Times, about the new bomb-sniffing dog at the Pittsburgh International Airport, was a winner:
At the airport, Pascha is all work and absolutely driven. Miller calls his partner, the only female on the force, his lady. He also has a little less flattering term for his four-footed significant other: "a German Shepherd with ADD." A malinois is a bit leaner, a bit edgier than a shepherd. Those triangle ears cap so much energy that Albert Einstein might be forced to rethink his computation and make energy equal to malinois squared.
(Tip of the Tube City hard hat to Ol' Froth.)
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Another fine line: "In private life, I am honest as the day is long, which, in early February, is not as long as it could be, but that's another matter." --- Garrison Keillor answering his email on the Prairie Home Companion website.
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Slate profiles Dunkin' Donuts, which is trying to hold its own against Starbucks, Krispy Kreme and other pretenders to its soggy throne.
I've never understood the fascination with Krispy Kreme's doughnuts, which taste like so much deep-fried air. Dunkin' Donuts aren't as tasty as good bakery doughnuts, but they beat Krispy Kreme, hands down.
Not that I've ever turned away a Krispy Kreme doughnut, mind you.
Which reminds me ... is it time for me to cut another hole in my belt?
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The readers of "Something Awful" do it again, with more digitally-altered images, now featuring "Boring Movies." It's hit and miss, but there are a few gems (warning: strong language 'n at).
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A Nova Scotia woman who goes by the handle "Ronniecat," and who I only know from her posts on Usenet, is suffering degenerative hearing loss. You can read about the progress of her disease, and about her decision to get a cochlear implant, at her website.
I'd recommend you go back to the beginning and read forward. If you don't find yourself choking up, you have no soul. What a writer, and what an ordeal.
She's also providing one helluva service to other people who are suffering from hearing loss; after all, her journal will be searchable via Google and all of the other usual suspects. When someone who's going deaf starts looking for information, and stumbles onto Ronnie's page, they're going to get better details from her than any doctor would provide.
Now, are blogs really just "CB Radio"? Hmm.
I was a weird kid. This should come as no surprise to people who know me as a weird adult, but I was. I was entertained by things that I had no right being entertained by --- and I'll thank you to get your mind out of the gutter.
When I was just a little shaver, I discovered a show on PBS that I didn't know of anyone else watching --- I don't think my parents watched it, anyway --- and I thought it was just about the most wonderful thing in the world. It was just a dapper-looking Irishman, sitting on a stool with a glass of what appeared to be whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, telling stories, with occasional breaks for sketch comedy. Usually there was a theme linking the stories with the sketches, but not always.
He was calm, suave, droll --- imagine an Irish Dean Martin with a PhD, and you'll have something almost, but not quite, like the impression he gave. For one thing, he was much more dismissive of authority than Dean Martin ever appeared to be. It wasn't until years later that someone pointed out that he was missing part of one of his fingers; I never noticed that. I was too busy watching him. This is what being an adult --- a man of the world --- was about.
I can thank him for opening my eyes and making me more accepting of many things later on --- sketch comedy and British humor (or should I say "humour"?), for instance, and Douglas Adams and Monty Python in particular. He also showed that it was possible for humor to be adult without being profane, and for you to make jokes about religion without being sacrilegious. He was a lapsed Catholic (or as he put it, "an atheist, thank God") but his jokes about the Church, or the differences between Protestants and Catholics were pointed without being vicious.
His show was on Saturday nights. We used to go to Mass Saturday nights. Can you imagine the irony? Our priest was an Irishman, too, and a kind and decent man, but he was as dry as the sands of the Mojave, and prone to giving these long stem-winding homilies. Then I'd go home and sneak off and watch another Irishman (and an atheist, no less) deconstruct the Catholic Church!
Like I said, no wonder I turned out weird. Years later, in high school, I discovered that the guy who would turn out to be my best friend --- still is, in fact, thank God --- also knew about this comedian, and like me, had snuck off to watch his routines on Saturday nights. To this day, when one of us is getting ready to tell a story, we'll lean way back on our chairs, pantomime holding a cigarette and a highball glass, and begin, "So an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a pub ..."
At some point, WQED stopped running the programs --- which were several years old when I first saw them --- but I never lost interest in the comedian. Occasionally, notes about him would appear in the newspaper (not much, however, because he never made much of a splash in the U.S.), and I even called a talk-radio program one time when the topic was "obscure celebrities."
Later, the Internet made it easy to track him down --- he was still working clubs in the U.K., had a regular series on the BBC, and had done bit parts in a few European movies. There was even a minor scandal a few years ago when a joke he told on the Beeb included the big granddaddy of all swear words: "We spend our lives on the run. We get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work, and then we retire. And what do they give us? A f--king clock!"
(Echoing the sentiments of Lenny Bruce 30 years earlier, he explained that it was the only appropriate word to use in the joke. "It's a disdainful word," he told reporters, "because it's not a damn clock, it's not a silly clock, it's not a doo-doo clock. It's a f--king clock!")
I had thought of him just the other day, and Googled his name --- soon I found a Website for British TV buffs where many of the posters had the same kinds of memories as I did. I kept hoping that PBS, which keeps cramming 30-year-old British sitcoms down our throats, would some day rediscover this guy and import some of his newer stuff to our shores, but they never did. I don't have digital cable, so I don't know if any of his stuff ever showed up on BBC America, but if it did, I never heard about it.
Like I said, he was a much bigger star in the U.K. and Australia than he was here; his humor was an acquired taste. Maybe Americans prefer British comedians to work in broad farce, like Benny Hill and John Cleese. Still, I was hopeful; everything else is coming out on DVD, including "Hee Haw," for crying out loud. Surely, sooner or later, someone would do a retrospective of his work, right?
And then yesterday, I checked in at Ivan Shreve Jr.'s "Thrilling Days of Yesteryear" and learned that Dave Allen had died suddenly over the weekend at the age of 68. The poor sod didn't make it to St. Patrick's Day, which doesn't quite seem fair.
I learned a lot about him from reading the obituaries in the British press; he was the son of a famous journalist, Cully Tynan O'Mahoney, an editor of The Irish Times. Allen wanted to be a reporter himself at one time, and worked as a copy boy for a while before getting a job at a British resort, the Times of London reports. He tried out his comedy act on tourists in the talent shows and was encouraged enough to go on a BBC talent show in 1959. In the early 1960s, Allen gained some notoriety as the opening act for a then little-known band called The Beatles at many of their performances in the U.K. and France; given the group's subversive sense of humor, that's some how not surprising.
He produced a number of documentaries and hosted several TV series in Britain, the last of which left the air in 1993. Allen also continued to tour the U.K. and British Commonwealth countries with success, though a series of concerts in Boston in 1981 was apparently a disaster. According to the Manchester Guardian, "U.S. audiences (found) the sacrilegious content of his act more difficult to stomach." No offense to the Grauniad, but Dave Allen was about as sacrilegious as a Jesuit, and the fact that his concerts in Boston were received so poorly says more about the uptight nature of that city's Catholics than it does about him.
One of the obits I read mentioned that a collection of Allen routines had just been released on DVD. I checked the usual suspects --- Amazon, Barnes & Noble, even Chapters in Canada --- and none of them had it, or could get it. I finally found the DVD on Amazon UK, and they're shipping it to me; technical support at Dementia Unlimited assures me that I'll be able to watch it on my computer. (Warning: If you don't know the difference between a "Region 1" DVD and a "Region 2" DVD, educate yourself before you order a DVD from overseas.)
I'm hoping that the routines are just as funny to me now as they were 20 years ago. I think they will be. When it arrives, I intend to sit back with a glass of whiskey (I don't smoke) and watch with a big happy grin on my puss.
In the meantime, Dave Allen, wherever you are, your sign-off makes a fitting epitaph: "Good night, and may your God go with you."
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