Posts Tagged Under ‘Pittsburgh’

Pittsburgh: Air Pollution Without the Benefits?

I just saw this today:

Pittsburgh beats Los Angeles as sootiest city

A professor in the article points out that it’s Ohio’s fault, as power-plant emissions drift across the state line. How did this happen when we don’t even have the factories anymore? If Pittsburgh kids have to have asthma, at least we could get some jobs for the trouble.

A Winner Is Clinton

Whiskey-drinking beat gutterball-bowling today in my home state’s leisure-activity primary, proving that the Canadian distilled-spirits industry packs an electoral punch that can’t be beat.

I’m pretty surprised by the results in this Pennsylvania primary-results graphic from NYTimes.com, in that I figured Hillary would probably win, but not by this much. She crushed Obama in all the whitey parts of central PA that will vote Republican anyway, but she also won Allegheny County. (Pitt students: as a large body of the young people who are supposed to be all “Obama is my life,” where were you on that one? Did everybody skip the primary today to drink 40s at the O?) Admittedly Allegheny was closer than the boonie counties, but then a 10% margin of victory (55-45) is pretty significant.

Six quick summations to end:

1. I’m not at all surprised by Hillary’s win;
2. I am surprised by her margin of victory;
3. Throwing the kitchen sink at your opponent works a lot better than political optimists would like to admit;
4. Hillary can kiss the black and youth vote goodbye if she wins the nomination;
5. Barack is just going to be a “meh” candidate for the huge working-class Democratic segment if he wins;
6. Winning the Democratic nomination is becoming more of a Pyrrhic victory each day.

Not Cool, The Economist

I was working my way through my weekly Economist when I came upon this gem in a story about Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh feels decayed, like Cleveland, Ohio.

What a bunch of jagoffs. Everybody knows Cleveland was the nation’s No. 1 poorest city in 2003, while Pittsburgh was only 37th. Take that, haters! We’re Number 37!

Obama and PA

Friend of the site Steve B., whose New York Islanders failed to make the playoffs and thus are not up three games to none like my Pittsburgh Penguins, writes:

what do you make of this Obama/Pennsylvania thing?

Well, Steve: in short, it was mad dumb and probably will get its damage on.

This is usually what happens when you play too hard to your audience, and playing to the audience is particularly frought with difficulty when your audience is a political group like San Francisco liberals that’s defined very specifically on a national level. Americans aren’t into the whole condescending thing, and thus will vote for someone who fronts like a regular guy even as he keeps them down over somebody who might genuinely care about average people but can’t hide a sense of hoity-toitiness well-enough. Obama already has problems with so many of his supporters being hip, urban types — the type of people who are resented by rural PA dudes. William Kristol really went off the deep end trying to say that this makes Obama into some closet Marxist, but this was still tone-deaf politically. So there’s that aspect of it that will hurt him with all the Pennsylvanians who like guns and religion, I think moreso than Jeremiah Wright — at least it was Wright saying that stuff, not Obama.

Plus, it doesn’t even make sense to say that people pursue cultural activities like hunting or religion because of their economic situation. Lots of people back home go hunting and go to church, and I can’t remember ever hearing someone walk out of Mass to shout, “Woo! Take that, all you outsourcing CEOs! Where’s your Chinese manufacturing now!?”

On a related note, liberal fans of cute furry things shouldn’t look down their noses at hunting. With all the deer in Pennsylvania that would otherwise end up starved to death or exploded by a tractor trailer, hunters are a vital population check, plus they tend to be very pro-environment. So there’s that.

Diamond Dave

If you had to set Pittsburgh to music, I always imagine the soundtrack to be early-era Van Halen. (Think Van Halen and 1984.) Particularly “Cradle Will Rock” and “Runnin’ With the Devil”.

This is almost solely attributable to WDVE.

Pittsburgh At Its Dumbest

It seems that Kennywood Park — Pittsburgh icon and the scene of such Pat Stack childhood highlights as the Jackrabbit Double-Dip and the time that I puked after getting riding the Pirate Ship — has been sold to the Spanish amusement-park company Parques Reunidos. This is after more than 100 years of being owned by the same two local families.

I was reading some reactions to the sale on this forum, and being familiar with the yinzer “That Used To Be Where You Take Your Driver’s License Test” sense of nostalgia, I probably could have predicted how things were going to go down. That didn’t stop me from appreciating these gems:

Well… add Amusement Parks to the growing list of American companies and infrastructure being sold to foreign interests. Didn’t the Spanish either attempt to buy or did indeed buy the Pennsylvania Turnpike? I expect to see Mt. Rushmore be put on the Auction block next or maybe Yellowstone Park. It has been said by a few the White House & the Capital Building are already owned by foreign interests. In a figurative sense of course.

I HAVE SPENT MY LAST DOLLAR AT KENNYWOOD, SAND CASTLE, OR IDLEWILD. IS THIS AMERICA? I’M NOT SURE ANYMORE.

I think it a shame the everything in the United States is be bought up by foreigner isn’t any thing sacred any more.

I’m tired of seeing our country being sold to foreigners.

USA is being sold down the river, everything is going to be owned by outsiders and the USA citizen will no longer have a job with an American-owned company.

So much for keeping America, America. Let’s look at the bright side… At least it was not sold to the Chinese.

Kennywood — when you hear that name you think of Fun and Hometown America! Now it will be foreign-run and as everything else; workers and owners will not speak English. Sad, actually!

Really? Kennywood workers who don’t speak English? Because that would be an odd choice from a business perspective, but since fur’ners hate America so much, those Spaniards just might flush their $200 million down the toilet to spite The Burgh.

You know my first thought on hearing this? “I really hope they didn’t sell to Six Flags.” Yep, American-owned Six Flags Theme Parks Inc., where you can get an order of chicken strips for no less than $8.50 and the rich pay extra to cut you in line all day with that SpeedPass thing. (They really hit you over the head there with metaphors for the buying-and-selling of meritocratic democracy.) We’d have been attending Six Flags Three Rivers before we knew it, and so much for the Potato Patch or the Monongahela Monster — no way I’m riding The Texan Octopus.

Lots of posters on that forum have legitimate gripes with the fact that Kennywood is no longer a family enterprise. I second that: It’s sad to see such a longtime icon absorbed into yet another conglomerate, even if I’m glad it’s not the Six Flags conglomerate. Recognizing that the Kennywood families ultimately had the power and there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m holding out hope that a deep-pocketed company will be willing to invest more in new rides, while realizing the value of keeping the existing local-oriented management. (That’s what they’re promising so far.) The Kennywood families have resisted attempts to sell before, so they must have had their reasons to pick this company. Considering the business value of Kennywood’s history, it probably won’t change too much, and the next generation will still be going each year to buy a new Kennywood outfit from Kaufmann’s. (My bad, they’re owned by Macy’s now. Damn!)

So let’s chill with the xenophobia for a minute and accept that it’s no longer 1957: you can’t go dahn ‘a corner and get two pahnds ‘a jumbo for a nickel. This is the world that our society has long since chosen to make for itself. And for the record, even though Spanish people don’t eat them, tacos are delicious.

3-0

That was the most relieving end to a football game in a long time.

And they even name-checked Woodland Hills. (Though from what I’ve read lately, it’s probably not a place to be proud of anymore. Be sure to read the part where a student tries to excuse his punching a cop because he thought he was only punching a security guard.)

Wiz Khalifa

This guy came out last year, but I had to give blog props to Pittsburgh’s newest and best rapper:

412!

Why Being From Pittsburgh is Like Being an Immigrant

Hey readaz.

My dad recently proposed the theory mentioned in today’s title. Here’s why it’s true:

• Pittsburgh has a large diaspora. Pittsburgh has a large population, with more than 2.3 million people living in the Greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area. That said, one look at this graph will tell you that that’s less impressive than it sounds. Why is this? Well, it’s a lot like Ireland back in the day: people gotta eat, and with no more mills or other replacement industry, off the population goes to Washington, Florida, Chicago or wherever else you find displaced black-and-gold-clad people wondering why they can’t buy chipped ham at the local deli.
• We have a weird language. Yinz knoew abaht the big business we dooew sell(w)in mugs ‘n ‘at with Pittsburghese quoots on ‘ere (confusing lowered-tonal questioning inflection)? Moost of ‘em gooes to people ahtside Picksburgh.
• Also, distinctive food. French fries on sandwiches? You know how we do. French fries with gravy? Yup. French fries on salad? What.
• When two Pittsburghers meet outside of Pittsburgh, they will inevitably talk about Pittsburgh. “Oh, for real? Where’d you go to high school?” is always my first question. Then, I make a joke based on the stereotype of their high school, say “for real though, that’s cool,” wait for them to ask where I went to school, say “Woodland Hills,” wait for the awkward silence / “Are you going to rob me?” joke, then commence the conversation about the state of the hometown today and how much I miss Primanti’s.

  This isn’t limited to the first meeting, either. Ask anyone who’s been around me when I’m with my friend Greg.

• We all say we’d love to move back, and mean it, but we likely never will. You may have a great love for your homeland, but sometimes you take a look around and realize that no matter what your original plans, you’ve made a life for yourself elsewhere that means a lot to both you and the other people in your life, and your desire to recoup your own memories starts to lose its prominence in the grand scheme of things. Sad, but also selfless.

Keep the faith, yinzers.

Class Divide Online?

Drop Internet knowledge, you say.

Alright.

I just read this interesting article (thanks, Jeremiah) from the BBC about how the Facebook - MySpace divide among teenagers also mirrors American class divisions. There’s certainly something to this. Not to prove a point from my earlier Jason Taylor post, but when I search high-school classmates on Facebook, I only get 11 results; on MySpace, I get 121. I tried this same thing searching for my college classmates to get the upper-crust perspective (let’s face facts about the majority of peeps who attend Northwestern), but Facebook won’t return more than 500 search results.

You can take the analogy even further than that: the craziness and totally unfiltered atmosphere of MySpace and the guideline-driven, orderly approach of Facebook in some ways mirrors the way our capitalist society works: the people at the top are a smaller group who tend to be more comfortable working the system and staying within a certain set of rules while building a secluded and idyllic existence, leaving everyone else who can’t or doesn’t want to join in to fend for themselves in a Hobbesian-type wizorld. Most people are on the outside looking in, kind of similar to how MySpace has a far larger customer base than Facebook.

But while you can make the outside-looking-in argument against Facebook, it’s equally easy for Facebook to make the basic marketing appeal of “come join our pleasant world, away from the noise” against MySpace: the social-networking world of MySpace outside the refined, neat, well-laid-out confines of Facebook is cacophonous, confusing, vulgar and, mostly, really damned stupid. (Also browser-crashing. Can’t leave out browser-crashing.) In a mirror of conservative critique of modern culture, if principled web design stands in for societal culture, then MySpace is setting the culture back faster and faster every day. When you want a break from the clatter, sometimes you just have to clutter together with like-minded people. Enter Facebook: the U Street of the Internet. For those of you who don’t live in DC, that’s a fast-growing neighborhood with lots of cultural history and cool places to chill, but suffering a potential influx of gentrifiers who can partially appreciate the appeal of the place but will kill that appeal by their growing presence. Kind of like Facebook opening up to high schoolers.

Finally, there’s the way both sites are run. Like the upper reaches of society, Facebook isn’t afraid to crib coolness when it sprouts up from the ranks of the masses, so long as that coolness can fit into its defined limits. (Think new Facebook apps.) And the guys with the power over the MySpace masses know that they probably should do better with restricting the negative consequences of the free-for-all, like porn-site friend-invite spam and the massive amounts of junk, but too many people are clamoring for the freedom to put junk onto their pages that restriction would just invite massive rebellion. (Think the drug war or Prohibition.)

I’m a Facebook man myself, though I also have the neglected MySpace account when I want a nod toward populism. But I gotta admit, that clean layout and crap-free functionality—even if it’s just the manufactured invention of some web designer—is just so freakin’ appealing. I guess that makes me a social-networking latté liberal? Either way, coffee tastes like dirt. And I mean that with no connection to my analogy at all, because coffee really does taste like dirt. It’s disgusting.

Knowledge dropped.

P.S. - Sorry, Friendster.

Sports Illustrated: Run by Snobs From Mt. Lebanon

Hey, Internets.

Don’t hate.

This week, Sports Illustrated had a big piece about Miami Dolphin and Pittsburgh native Jason Taylor. Not only did the article improve my opinion of Taylor a great deal (check out the part where a pro athlete puts sports into perspective with politics), but Woodland Hills H.S., the alma mater of JT and your resident author, even got a name-check. (Taylor was home-schooled but played senior year football for the school team as a district resident.)

That was cool, and I was pumped reading the article. Then I got to this part:

Yet as much as Taylor, in this instance, is guilty of stereotyping his fellow pros, he bristles when others’ expectations of how an athlete should act are used against him … And don’t get Taylor started on the notion some have that his unabashed ambition makes him something of a sellout to his roots. (He grew up in a largely underprivileged neighborhood.)

Huh say what???

Woodland Hills has its nasty areas (shoutout to Rankin and Braddock!) but it’s otherwise smack dab in the middle of American socioeconomic strata. Both Jason Taylor and myself are from Wilkins Township, one of the municipalities in WHSD (read this old Akron page), which I don’t know how someone could see as being “underprivileged”. (Peep these housing prices).

Woody High has a pretty battered rep in the local media, and it’s true that I have plenty of weird stories that I probably wouldn’t have gotten at Upper Middle Whitebread High. But some writer-reporter here is painting the whole district with a pretty broad brush that makes for a better story, but isn’t quite true.

What more can I say: The streetz is a mutha.