The Post-Gazette has, on Sundays, been running a feature called “The Cutting Edge”, where they post snippets from Pittsburgh-related blogs. (Yes, I still get 90% of my news on dead trees. Portable, useful for stuffing shipping boxes, and doesn’t require me to pay some silly “hotspot” to read it.) It has sunk to new lows. You may recall that Chinese newspaper that accidentally recycled a story from The Onion?. Scroll down this week’s Cutting Edge and find “One of America’s great newspapers” doing the same thing. I’d like to hope they’re just adding it in as a bit of comic belief, but the lack of framing text makes me think someone there is just plain asleep at the switch.

Not to worry, though. They’re a “manufacturer” according to state law, and thus aren’t required to pay property taxes. With all that money they’re saving, I’m sure they can put it towards finding, you know, real news to report on once in a while.

The Post Gazette which is always there to paint a smiley on every rotten egg the local government lays had a hard time with the Hi-Tops story.One is left to wonder how serious people could have built a business plan on such fragile ground and lays out in detail just how damaging the double stadiums are to economic life on the North Side.

Harold Rothstein,a consultant for the bar said.”The Pirates got great tradition and we were here for the worst six years in the history of the Pirates and I think that’s a big economic factor.” So, basically the place depended on just the teams and was counting on winning seasons? “And while Hi-Tops crowds swelled on Pirates game days, they never were quite as large as they could have been had the team been winning. “On game days, it’s great. On non-game days, it’s a ghost town,” he added.”

According to Robert Lampl, HT’s attorney, they were paying 30,000 a month in rent, and sited the fact the business way productive only about 100 days a year. He said the bars owners expected faster development near the stadiums which would create foot traffic. But we can see now how much the teams need parking and that calls most development into doubt.

Several, of the other business owners interviewed admitted how slow, the area was in the Pirates off season but none seemed to be in the bleak shape of Hi-Tops. Some of them are getting business from the local office crowd and may be getting a little business from the small downtown residential population, local populations that probably would have been much bigger if the stadiums had never been built.

Post-Gazette:

Seventy first-year graduate students in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University got as dirty as coal miners yesterday gutting four, century-old houses. Another 170 got rained on hauling pallets, pushing wheelbarrows, lugging mulch and collecting litter.

As dirty as coal miners? Really? I am sure that actual coal miners are impressed.

Swetha Bharadvaj lit up at the idea. “This will be great,” she said. “It’s a great project for us. We were talking earlier about ethics and the importance of acting with a broader perspective” beyond business.

“This sounded fun to me,” said Sereana Seim. “They told us we’d get filthy. I said, ‘Sign me up.’”

At five o’clock each student was issued a gray pin-striped suit and assured he would never have to worry about dirt again, barring the occasional mud spatter on his jodhpurs from polo pony hooves.

The Post-Gazette website has this notice shoehorned into the middle of the main page:

TO OUR READERS:
post-gazette.com is ready to celebrate its 10th anniversary with a fresh look, better navigation and new features throughout the site. In the days and weeks ahead, watch for exciting changes at post-gazette.com, where you’ll always find the latest local news and the region’s best online coverage of sports, lifestyle, business and entertainment.

Good to know that they are ready. One hopes they are also willing and able.

I should be kinder to the Post-Gazette. Their web presence blows the city’s other daily out of the water. The Tribune-Review’s nausea-inducing interface and infuriating screaming advertising are best avoided (note to Trib: I link to the P-G stories rather than Trib ones, even if yours are better, because I will not subject readers to your noisy banner ads and pop-ups if I can avoid it. I am willing to guess I am not the only internet writer who feels that way).

Except for the City Paper, which had the good sense to spend a few bucks to upgrade from their old, baffling web design last year, the P-G is a lot stronger than the weeklies in town too, each of which has its own weaknesses (the Courier lacks decent archives, the Pittsburgh Business Times is clunky, the Jewish Chronicle just plain stinks).

So, anyway, they are good. I am happy that they are planning to get better, with the caveat that I worry that “getting better” to them means making their reporters carry around DAT recorders to make mini-podcasts as Dennis Roddey has done of late. Why, though, are they telling us they are “ready” to do it? An old saying pops to mind about what one might compel oneself to do, with the alternative of getting off the pot.

The Harris Grill is a mainstay of Shadyside, with hipster style to go with its hipster clientele. The menu features a variety of delicious cuisine. Much of the delectable delights are derived from standard bar food, except with quality ingredients and snarky, choke-inducing puns (examples: Cheeses of Nazareth and Britney Spears).

Wait - that should all be in the past tense, since it was gutted by a blazing inferno on Saturday. Sadly, no hipsters were harmed in the fire.

I’m being snarky myself, but I think the owners and operators of the Grill kind of deserve it. It’s an extraordinarily good thing that nobody was injured, since it could have easily happened differently.

Inexcusably, the Harris Grill had no smoke detectors.

Also, this:

Firefighters found a wooden fire escape and the top floor in flames when they arrived about 10:15 p.m. Saturday. After not finding the stairs, fire crews were forced to leave the building and switch to Plan B.

Note: they didn’t find any stairs to the floor that was on fire because there weren’t any. The firefighters’ Plan B involved poking holes in the roof, among other things. So not only were the patrons of Harris Grill in danger, the brave folks entrusted to put the fire out were in danger, too.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that perhaps we have municipal fire codes for a reason.

The owners of the Grill have vowed to rebuild. With luck, they’ll have the foresight to install $5 devices that might keep its patrons safe from another accident.

Also, note the sad coincidence embedded in delicious, pan-seared irony: the unaltered logo of the Harris Grill.

NOTE (08/15/2007): The sentence that reads “I’m being snarky myself, but I think the owners and operators of the Grill kind of deserve it” follows standard sentence structure. The noun “it” refers to “snarky.” I in no way intended to suggest that the Harris Grill somehow deserved to be destroyed by fire. I apologize for the confusion.

an iPhone is $2,206.92 over 2 years. Check out this post on the Mint blog. Mint is still in beta, but I think it is a new website for managing your money. They have some really interesting articles on the Mint blog. I have always had a fascination with smart money management and I was reminded at lunch today that I frequently use the term penny wise and pound foolish.
I find this number for the true cost of and iPhone to be interesting. I actually thought it would be higher. I think it is not crazy to spend $1000/year on a cell phone. While at first $1000/year on a cell phone seems crazy, that little cell phone, at a cost of about $100/month lets me do lots of things. I can jump on a conference call from anywhere. I can quickly check an email. So for me, I think it is an expense that is worth the investment.
the folks at Mint also list out the true costs of having a dog, owning a house, driving a car and raising a kid. The true cost of dog ownership is - around $12,000 - I was surprised by that one. What do you think - is your dog worth $12,000? I wonder how much a cat costs? Don’t forget to factor in cat licensing.

Some months ago Mayor Ravenstahl, seen here instituting middle school dance rules by which female members of his administration must stand on one side of the room and males on the other to prevent cootie contamination, made “retention of youth top priority.” In so doing he “announced the formation of the Propel Pittsburgh Commission,” which would allow Pittsburghers under 35 to sit in a room together with the Mayor. It would be kind of like Tequila Willie’s, but without the music.

I applied. Between the announcement and the deadline for applications there were seventeen days, which seemed like a pretty long time to me. I still have not received my badge, so I called up the Mayor’s office to see if my application had been misplaced.

“No, we’re still in the process of selection,” Diana told me. Diana is Neil Parham’s secretary. Parham has the title “Youth Policy Manager” and is reputed to exist, although he didn’t show up for work today and appears nowhere I can find on the city’s website.

Diana tells me that the commission members will be selected sometime next month, and the first meeting will, they hope, take place in August. That is, at best we will finally see this group sit down together four months after it was made “top priority.”

If that is the standard by which the Mayor and Neil Parham judge speed of work, I suppose it is not really that surprising that they predicted it would take seventeen days to fill out a one-page form. I shouldn’t judge, though. After all, the Mayor has been very busy with his other duties.

On the up-side, I actually got an answer from someone in the Mayor’s office. After their refusal to talk to me about contraception in February and March and apparent total ignorance of the Mayor’s tax abatement plan (I talked to nearly a dozen people in both the government and Luke’s campaign in April trying to get a hold of it, and none of them even seemed to know that there was such a thing) I was beginning to worry that they had something against me. I can’t imagine why.

Swoon In Garfield
Swoon In Brooklyn
More Swoon

One of the weird and I guess kind of great things about Pittsburgh is that people and things that would cause riots in many places go unnoticed here. The images above, which you might have run into in doorways, or under bridges in Pittsburgh are from one of the most Famous artists to regularly show here. She goes by the name of Swoon and will be in a group show at in Braddock tonight.

“Swoon first took her art to the street five years ago while she was a fine-arts student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was compelled to take her work outside after suffering what she calls “the quiet, boring preciousness” of the gallery world.

“I wanted to jump out of my skin,” she said. But the streets were free and open to a wider range of expression. “Because it’s kind of an outlaw thing, you don’t have to go through official channels,” she explained. “It’s trying to create a visual commons out of the derelict walls of the city.” (She has since returned to the gallery scene, as the star of her own shows in Berlin, Miami and Cincinnati. “I need to make a living,” she shrugged.)

Tribune-Review:

Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl today said he regrets how he answered a question about a trip he took to New York City with billionaire Penguins co-owner Ron Burkle, who treated the mayor to a flight on his private jet and dinner and drinks at a swanky Manhattan hotel.
“Certainly I wish I would have clarified and continued to answer the question from there,” Ravenstahl said this afternoon during an American Heart Association event at Heinz Field. “But If I could have been more clear at that point it would have been, I think, in everybody’s best interest, mine included at this point.”

The trip was campaign-related and not illegal, he said.

This is not the first time the campaign of Wee Luke, seen here thanking some people who helped him out of a jam at a football game that he used to say never happened, has had to try to bail him out after he told an usupportable lie to a reporter.

Someone really needs to tattoo this phrase onto Luke’s palm: “WHEN A REPORTER ASKS IF YOU HAVE BEEN IN AN EMBARRASSING PLACE OR HAD AN ILL ADVISED CONVERSATION, OR BEEN ARRESTED FOR PUBLIC BAD BEHAVIOR, THE REPORTER ALREADY KNOWS THAT YOU HAVE.” I mean, they don’t just guess at this stuff.

I am amazed by this repetition of shockingly poor judgement.

By the way, while he was being wined and dined by the owner of the Penguins, just hours after promising the Penguins a big pile of money, he was blowing off a meeting with people from the Hill, who had some concerns about a large arena being built in their neighborhood for the benefit of the owner of the Penguins.

I am sure that they have nothing to worry about. After all, historically the city has been nothing but empathetic and helpful to the residents of the Hill District when it comes to the construction of hockey arenas.

I wonder if this means that Luke has decided that he can win without the support of black people, as long as he has the support of the rich white people who want to build casinos and arenas where those black people reside. His opponent can’t say: the only black person he knows is Khari Mosley.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a feature called Whispers in which they try to make it seem hip and edgy to say nasty things about Democrats and nice things about Republicans. This past Sunday’s edition took aim at Mayor Luke, seen here with classmates. After a brief discussion of how there came to be a gas main leak in Point State Park last week comes this:

City Public Safety Director Michael Huss, Public Works Director Guy Costa, EMS Chief Bob McCaughan and Equitable Gas workers were among those who rushed to the scene.

Proof once again that fine dining trumps crisis management when one’s stomach is growling — even two months before the Democrat [sic] primary.

So Luke sent the proper personnel to the scene and then demonstrated that there was nothing to worry about by continuing to go about business as usual? That bastard!

You know, I miss martyred hero-mayor Bob O’Connor, seen here calling forth the boundless power of the sorcerer Shazam, as much as the next guy, but you can’t expect every mayor to solve problems by bursting through the stone walls of the City-County Building and fusing shut gas-line rifts with his heat vision. Your average mayor does exactly what Luke did, and the mayor-child should be commended for it.

The Trib does like the personal touch, though. A little-reported facet of the gas main story was the line of Tribune-Review editors, led by Colin McNickle, who rolled like a freight train out the doors of the Clark Building, across the Hot Pretzel Bridge, and into Point State Park demanding that city workers compress the entire editorial board into a hyper-dense gas plug of flesh so the city might be saved.

To everyone’s disappointment, this measure did not turn out to be necessary.