We are hip deep in the silly season here. Lemieux picked an awful week to retire. Not only has my hometown decided to change its name, but the prep work has led to the following creepy bits of promotion floating along the way.

From an interoffice mail propagated by the Pittsburgh Visitors and Convention Bureau:

Pittsburgh International Airport is now home to two life-size models of two Western Pennsylvania greats - Franco Harris and George Washington. The full-size models, created by the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, were unveiled Friday, Jan. 27. Both models are sculpted to exact, full-size dimensions, and are on permanent display at the airport on the airside.

GW's turn in Western PA, however, was right about at the same level as Franco's turn in Seattle.

And then there's this:

Steelers fever has taken flight at the National Aviary, with half-price admission Friday through Sunday, Feb. 3-5, to anyone wearing black and gold. Other special activities include a "Spot the Steelers Bird" game, in which visitors can go bird watching to find the many black and gold birds on exhibit at the National Aviary.

One hopes paint was not involved, but I don't know.

Then there's this, which reads strangely like a celebration named by Homestarrunner:

Pittsburgh Steelers Polama-luau with star100.7, Friday, Feb. 3, from 5 to 8 p.m., at SouthSide Works Town Square. Happy Hour specials, live music and giveaways. Everyone dressed in black & gold will receive a free lei!

And this:
A formal government waiver allowing the bearer to eat pierogies. I always wanted one of those.


Meanwhile, there's the Pirates, who in order to keep pace with the whole thing, they have decided this was the optimal time to announce they were going with the College of Mascots plan.

I'd be inclined to add another iron law to go with the premise. Let's put "I've never seen a 14-seasons-under-.500 team succeed WITHOUT a second mascot" in the same corner, and said in the same urgent yet indignant tone, as "I've never seen a globalization protest succeed WITHOUT satrical giant puppetry."

Then again, even our likely CF starter is impressed:

"I think, with all of our offseason moves that people are really excited about this season," said Duffy, who signed autographs yesterday. "Things here have a taken a 360-degree turn. I feel like we are a winning team already, and we haven't even started."

How impressed is Duffy? Why, it's blown away his knowledge of trigonometry!

I had plans to pull of a meme coup for the Super Bowl, but I got lazy. Simple plan for a flash animation: Image of a thumb, seemingly moving as if it were screaming the words from the old Sinistar game "BEWARE! I HUNGER!" over and over again. Then I saw this and realized I couldn't quite be that disturbing.

Well, this is interesting. I was figuring the next public official to get indicted around here would be the ex-mayor. I was apparently wrong.

It's important to note we may be well into the meta-region here. We're going to need talking heads on news shows to talk about the legal case against a talking head on news shows.

One thing however is for sure, with 84 counts, the prosecutors knew it would take more than one bullet to take him out.

UPDATE: Now that's a headline. Awesome.

We may have to open up another level of FraughtWatch, because Maurice Clarett is utterly shattering the parameters by which we judge this. Our latest:
robbery. Seriously, at this point, he's reached his limit, the only thing I can see that can top this is escaping the country to Paraguay and then being found attempting to cheat centenarian Nazi collaborators out of their canasta winnings. And of course it would fail as a bystander would recognize him.