Category: default || By jt3y

We're still accepting your nominations for your favorite Mon-Yough area spot --- the kind of a place you'd take an out-of-towner. The best ones will be added to our Mon-Yough visitors page. We've already received several good ones, and the best will receive a free gift from the Tube City Online store. Email jt3y at dementia dot o-r-g or leave your information in the comments section of the Almanac.

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Norwin High School has a connection to a Nobel Prize winner, reports Craig Smith in the Tribune-Review. Alumna Jacquelyn Savani, Class of 1966, is married to David Gross, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics this year.

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The News shares the Almanac's call to arms for Mon-Yough residents to protest Port Authority's service cuts:

In some communities, it is a nuisance; in others, a nightmare. "That means anybody up here after 9 p.m. or the weekend can't get out of here," Liberty Mayor Edward Slater said. ...

The message is, contact your state legislators and get more money for Port Authority and other transit agencies, or else.

I hate to dispute Hizzoner, who is a good man, but he obviously has never ridden the 60P Port Vue-Liberty bus, which only runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. But his sentiment is true enough.

Lincoln Mayor Nick Vay tells the News that "privatized bus services never had the woes Port Authority has." Well, I know of a lot of veterans of Pittsburgh Railways, Penn Transit, Ridge Lines and the rest who would tend to disagree with him. After World War II, Pittsburgh Railways teetered constantly on the brink of bankruptcy, and the other companies ran on shoestring budgets.

Public transit only makes money on the very busiest routes; the rest of the routes run at a loss. If you only run the busiest routes, then you don't really have a "public" transit system. If you want a truly public transit system, that's the drawback you face.

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Dave Barry is taking a leave of absence from his colyum, which runs locally in the P-G and the Trib. I am not making this up.

By the way, "Dave Barry's Leave of Absence" would be a great name for a band.

No one from any newspaper, including the ones that I "worked" for, has ever cared about my opinion (and with good reason). Unfortunately, I don't know what they're going to replace Barry with. The P-G already uses Gene Weingarten's "Below the Beltway" (syndicated through the Washington Post Writers Group), which I think is very funny. As far as I know, James Lileks' "Backfence" isn't syndicated (his political columns are available through Newhouse). After those two, the pickins of good newspaper humor columnists get mighty slim.

Anyone know of a good syndicated humor columnist besides those three?

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Via John Cleese's Web site:

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There's nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.

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According to the McKeesport Heritage Center newsletter, Oct. 4 was the 100th anniversary of the opening of Tube City Brewing Co. at the corner of Twelfth Avenue and Walnut Street in Our Fair City, with "an outlay of $500,000 of local capital."

That would be roughly $10 million in today's money. Who were the last private investors to commit $10 million to a new business in Our Fair City, I wonder? And what happened to the entrepreneurial spirit that has kept private investors from putting up that kind of money into a business venture here?

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Besides having natural mellowing agents, ketchup is also one of the few products that cannot be improved by adding different flavors to it, reports Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker.

I like my ketchup just the way it is, frankly, as long as no one over the age of 10 puts it on hot dogs. Hot dogs are best served with mustard, relish, onions or chili. Not ketchup, and that's the way God and Oscar Mayer intended it.

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To do this weekend: A big high school football matchup, as 7-1 McKeesport meets 7-1 Gateway tonight at Antimarino Stadium in Monroeville. Both teams are already playoff-bound, but bragging rights for the Quad Southwest Conference are on the line. (My alma mater, which plays Duquesne tomorrow on the road, has a shot at the playoffs only if the rest of the WPIAL gets the flu for the rest of the season.)

Edgewood Symphony Orchestra plays at CCAC Boyce Campus Saturday night. Call 412-473-8880.

McKeesport Heritage Center hosts its second annual Founder's Day Celebration from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Sunday (members were to RSVP by Wednesday).