Because there's no way to write into a tossup without completely mangling the central joke upon which it would hang. ("February 4, April 1,...")
I give you the best meaningless city proclamation of 2006.

Quite simply this is the best story I've ever seen on local news. No comedy writer could script this. The levels of "seriously, WTF?" in this is tremendous. Best subtext point for me is "wait, the woman was going to use this? Wouldn't that be even more suspicious?"

I think this would explain why you do ask for the Original Whizzinator by name.

I'd just like to demonstrate my sympathy for the microwave in this case. It was just doing its job.

Randomized thoughts, because random's all I got left at this point.

Okay, defcon 5 on the crazy here now. And I'm insulated because the majority of people I'm working with aren't natives of the area. We've seen people inducing labor so the game won't be missed, a mad quest for people to get T-shirts saying "Drink Like A Champion Today" mimicking our quarterback, who has now successfully cultivated the image of "doofus with an arm", which is much better than the Peyton Manning "really good arm, but possibly slightly retarded" image. (D-Caf indeed.)

Bill brought up two important notes this week. First of all, people will ask celebrities things because they are celebrities. Seriously, did we need to know what Placido Domingo's pick is, if he's not singing it? And Phyllis Diller's alive? And Senator Kerry still hasn't learned the "Pittsburgh's Own" meme is like calling Godwin on your own argument. It only works ironically now.

The second bit Bill brought up. Phil, the groundhog, wore a Terrible Towel. Given that my dad is convinced that Gus, the PA Lottery groundhog is Rendell's illegitimate son, given a cushy government job, this just puts the whole governor's race in prospective. We now have a Steelers candidate and an Eagles candidate, why not have a Steelers groundhog and an Eagles groundhog?

When you're 6 years old, and in quick succession you see your teams, which admittedly, you hadn't followed all that much, pull off a World Series and a Super Bowl, your bearings get knocked off. At this point I'm trying to figure if it's the crazy stuff I'm noticing, or that I'm so crazy at this point the only moderately crazy stuff looks totally normal.

While the panic has set in with the tweaked ankle of Troy (insert Achilles' heel jokes here), I'm still more concerned about the injury possibly suffered by Dan Kreider. Mostly because we don't have a backup fullback, but also because he clears the lane there, and all our running backs need that from time to time. Comparatively, the injury, however slight, ruins my line for the playoffs.
"Witness the power of a fully functional Pola-mullet." If he's not fully functional, that's just hard to say.

Last time they did this I was sitting in my apartment in Ithaca. They didn't win. I'm going back home this weekend, I don't want to jinx it.

If everything works perfectly, Steelers 35, Seahawks 13. Why that? Because I have 5-3 in the pool.

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.

Marginalia from the holiday.

1. The Coke holiday ad this year is just annoying me, mostly because I keep wanting to tell people when I watch it, "You see that, that's appeasement. The little penguin will come back and say the polar bears have promised peace in our time."

2. I have a housepet now. I got a Roomba for Christmas, now I have to restrict the urge to mod it with a speaker and chips so it screams "Exterminate!" while it works.

3. Plans to see the ABA Pittsburgh Xplosion fell through on Monday as their holiday games were postponed, because of event competition. They apparently scheduled the game on the same night as the annual appearance of the Harlem Globetrotters.

4. I think I'm becoming overwhelmed by the tyranny of Avenir. Avenir is the sans serif that seems to be everywhere right now. Not quite a Futura, not quite Avant Garde, not really at all Helvetica. And when I say it's everywhere, I mean it. Yahoo's using it for titling, as is USA Network, as is Toyota in an ad, as is one of the books I'm trying to read. It's not so much that it's actually overwhelming me mentally, I'm just struck by the suddenness with which it took over the slot the other fonts took, and the mental association I have with that suddenness is overwhelming whatever messages the text is trying to convey.

I finished reading Freakonomics, (which is interesting in ways that people wanting to find interesting ways to look at things will love, and for those of you that don't want to find that will hate,) and I got stuck on a passage, in parentheses no less.

"(In Finland, whose education system has been ranked the world's best, most children do not begin school until age seven but have often learned to read by watching American television with Finnish subtitles.)"

Am I wrong in thinking (outside of the obvious correlation does not imply causation issues), that a cheap way to simulate this in America is to turn on the closed captioning on the TV? And how many paranoid parents can I take in with this?

Well, if this doesn't kill the ABA, nothing will. Read this.

I place the odds of a stinging expose at 70%. The odds of a comic novel at 90%.

More here.

This article

Paragraph 2

Cuidado. Cuidado.

That is all.

Somehow, I figured this interesting article titled Iceberg 'sings under pressure' was going to result in the punchline, "no, sorry, we were wrong, it was actually Ice, Ice Baby."

WHOA!

Not the top story. The bit immediately after the top story.

A while back I found an article noting that Pittsburgh has the lowest percentages of immigration from Latin America of any city its size (or even significantly lower). Well, somehow I can't see this plan fixing it, unless they're expecting to capitalize on a massive influx of Aztec-Americans.

If I were Al Julius, I'd be eating my script right now.

This election result positively shocked me. I had realized there was a backlash against incumbents rolling through the state after the literal midnight pay raise, but this is something else. Even on a 51-49 rejection, we've never had a judge tossed before. If this anger continues, and it probably will, you could see every contested office in the state up for grabs next year.

Okay, with all of this being planned, how long before the Weather Channel follows the long slow path of descent into unwatchability previously traveled by MTV and ESPN.

Incidentally, the last time I heard celebrity weatherman used as a gimmick, it was some failed iteration of CBS This Morning, and their guest was Henry Kissinger. That went well.

For anyone who ever doubted that data mining occurs, and that the results are untouched by human hands, I give you this proof. If this had ever gone past human eyes it would have been stopped or the person who reviewed this would have collapsed in laughter unable to continue.

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased Audio CDs by William Shatner also purchased Christmas Album...

Okay that's two "low-cost" airlines that I've flown on, only to see them go bankrupt shortly after. (ATA being the previous, won't count USAir since I hadn't actually flown them in two years.)

So, should I just Priceline myself out, where the lowest bidder is the one I fly on, dooming it?

You know if it's not the zombies, and it's not the robots... It's the deer.

Somebody discussing this on Fark noted that there was a time in the '90s when the city of Pittsburgh declared complete open season on deer. If they were in the city, they were legal to hit. Didn't matter if you had a permit on that weapon, didn't matter what the weapon was, it was a legal hit. I really want to know two things:

-- Was this actually true? Did Murphy just snap one weekend after his rhododendron got eaten or something?
-- Was this before or after the weekend that the bear did a bar crawl down Carson Street, then escaped when animal control came by swimming across the river to downtown? (This would have been about 1996-7ish.)

While it's a little too possible in a crazy-ass way, I fear we haven't quite made enough fans of ironic football to make this a workable venture. Then again, if we turned it into a reality show, it would probably be less embarrassing than Dick Butkus' turn coaching high school.

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Craig mentioned the insidious creep of the Christmas season, which I noted this evening already has absorbed the section where the candy was at the drugstore and one rack of CD's at Best Buy, but I caught this article today, and got completely creeped out by this website which tries to map out all the best deals for the Friday after Thanksgiving like it's Ain't It Cool News or something, except it for the circulars you normally roundfile. What got me was the "24 Days Left" at the top. Great... It's only 24 more shopping days before.... SHOPPING DAY! PANIC! Yes, we're now marking Black Friday as the holiday, not Thanksgiving....great....

I think I'll stand down by the door and catch the retailers when they fall from the fourteenth floor.