Good show, sir.  Good show.

Spotted in Oakland, on Fifth Avenue.

But those Cholinergic receptors that form ligand-gated ion channels in cells’ plasma membranes are powerful little buggers. They make you do funny things, like strangle a hobo with his own pants for a puff of his savory dog-end*.

I didn’t actually do that, but I did develop a strong dislike of the smell of cigarette smoke, a dislike that began as a dislike for the smell specifically while I was eating.

And although the state legislature has passed an inherently anti-freedom, anti-smoking law, it won’t start forcing business owners to stop people from smoking for a few weeks yet, you should still know your options. If you’re like me, and you’d rather eat a meal without people smoking around you, you can do things the old fashioned way and vote with your wallet.

Despite its misleading name, SmokeFree Pennsylvania is not in the business of distributing gratis tobacco products. They’re much more concerned with giving customers the ability to find those restaurants that are capable of making the to-smoke-or-not-to-smoke decision on their own without government influence - and they’ve given you a handy guide to it. I give you a direct link to their restaurant and bar listings, but only so you don’t have to suffer through their pro-ban boostering on the front page, since it’s perfectly possible to be against a behavior and still support another person’s right to do it.

* that’s a British term for a cigarette

Anyway, the Pittsburgh area has a hockey team that interests me way more than the Penguins interest me, except this more interesting team doesn’t exist except in a movie and it’s not spending millions of dollars on a new rink or whatever.

Ladies and gentlemen: the Monroeville Zombies!

Kevin Smith, the director of Zack and Miri Make a Porno, is a bit of a geek, which typically includes being a fan of zombies and zombie movies. Monroeville Mall was the location of the original Dawn of the Dead. Aside from that, Smith’s new movie was filmed in Pittsburgh, creating a perfect little package of Pittsburgh/nerdy/zombie/Kevin Smithy references.

The movie opens on October 31st. Duh.

The Boring family is suing Google for driving into their private driveway and including the resultant images in its searches. They might actually have a case, since the Smoking Gun shows how intrusive Google’s camera car appeared to be (in these pictures, specifically).

The legal side isn’t what interests me. Instead, we look to the Associated Press’s article about the invasion of privacy suit, which makes great pains to blast the Boring door wide open with information freely available on the Allegheny County website!

Anybody interested in purchasing property in the area knows about the utility of the county’s real estate website. There is far more information there than a series of multi-angle photographs, as the Associated Press indicates in its coverage. It makes one ask the question, possibly to oneself or even possibly to others: is it ok for the government to compile and offer this kind of information to anybody, instantly, and yet not ok for a private company like Google to take pictures of somebody’s front yard?

The passage of that era is a gradual slough of analog into digital, and certainly not something that happens in an instant. One indicator of this fundamental evolution of media distribution is that Paul Mawhinney’s gigantic record collection is likely going to be the last of its kind.

When Rasputina’s new album came out, I clicked a link and downloaded it to my computer. I’ve been doing it this for long enough that I haven’t bought a physical copy of music in at least four years. If you think I’m in the minority, think again - the iTunes Music Store, which exists only in the digital aether, is now the number 2 largest music seller.

Paul can retire, now that the collection has been sold to a “gentleman from Ireland.” It seems only fitting that the largest compendium of hard-copy music recordings found its next owner via a site that also has no physical component - it sold for $3,002,150 on eBay.

Since I originally wrote about him, Randy has since been on Oprah, among other things. Though that particular milestone probably wasn’t on his famous list of things to accomplish, one of the other things became a little more attainable.

J.J. Abrams, director of the newest incarnation of Star Trek (a movie that co-stars Pittsburgh native Zachary Quinto), heard about Randy’s long-held wish and made him an offer:

So, I just wanted to put the invitation out there — that if you had any desire to be in the film (can’t promise you role as CAPTAIN, but… we could do SOMETHING!), it would be my honor and pleasure.

Like any good fan, Randy took J.J. up on the offer - you can read about his adventure on his blog (you’ll have to scroll down a bit for it).

But it’s not all about the art - onecoldhand.com also allows the loser to locate the lost (by dropping the site an email), and for users to submit the gloves that they find in their sloshy, soggy Pittsburgh winter travels - just drop the glove in a handy-dandy drop-box at many neighborhood coffee shops (see the site for a list).

Instead of a massive shopping complex, Wal-Mart has decided to “…return the hillside to a pre-development, natural sloping condition that includes trees and vegetation.” They have not ruled out building a store there, and they aren’t letting go of the property just yet. In Wal-Mart’s defense, their spokesman answered this question after posing it to himself: “Is there ever a realistic opportunity for us to build there? I don’t think so.”

Below, you can see an old Google Maps satellite photograph of the beautiful, dilapidated complex that used to be there, the famous Dixmont State Hospital, which, for almost 150 years, somehow managed to coexist peacefully with the hillside’s 42 million liters of dirt.

View Larger Map

While the greatest burden of sadness lies with those who know him best, I can’t help but feel moved by his story, which you can read at the PPG site. The world is most certainly a better place having had him in it.

Though I never had Dr. Pausch as a professor, I think he still has something to teach me, and maybe something that we can all learn. The guy who cuts you off on the parkway, the screaming children in Giant Eagle, the snotty people at work - these and so many other struggles are such brief, meaningless trifles. You think you have problems?

Dr. Pausch had a handful of dreams as a child; if you exclude the dreams most marked by childhood longing (being Captain Kirk and playing in the NFL), he accomplished every single one of them.

The lesson I learn, and the most valuable lesson to those of us who only know him from the news, is that life is too short to let fear of failure or the appearance of daunting obstacles prevent us from achieving our own dreams. The fear that prevents us from acting can be controlled, cast aside, ignored. Dr. Pausch may not have been able to accomplish everything he wanted to, but at least he tried.

If you knew you had only months to live, could you say the same?

Whether you say yes or no, there’s no rush - you have the rest of your life to change your answer.

(thanks go to PittGirl for writing about this first)

Having not watched much football that didn’t involve either a black and gold or blue and gold color scheme, let alone traveling to other cities for that specific purpose, I can’t say whether Atlanta deserves the number one spot on Mr. Whitaker’s list.

I can say, however, that Pittsburgh should at least replace Las Vegas on the list, since he admits that Vegas has only one football team. He further justifies his decision by noting that one can gamble on the results of the games there and, get this, because football is on lots of television sets.

I’d like to suggest that perhaps football is on a lot of television sets here, too.

Using Mr. Whitaker’s logic, Pittsburgh’s exclusion is even more detestable. Pittsburgh has a major college football program, and WVU is only an hour away - not to mention the proximity of dirty, filthy Cleveland and Cincinnati. In fact, you might say that Pittsburgh occupies a veritable pigskin nexus.

The most overriding, obvious, unavoidable reason for including Pittsburgh as the best city for watching football is the fact that your humble blogger cared not one whit about the sport until moving here five years ago. Even my rock-hard resistance to organized sports of any stripe was easily demolished by the irresistible force of Steelers Fever. Other expats might not agree, or might not have felt the early symptoms of it (the earliest of which being a small tug of joy when Troy flies, frog-like, at a loose ball).

The Steelers infuse everything in this city, and I think they even put something in the drinking water. Even if you don’t really care about sports, you can still probably notice when the Steelers lose - a malaise settles across the city, clingy and oppressive like Pittsburgh before a thunderstorm.

I would offer one last bit of evidence to Mr. Whitaker, in the hopes of getting our city its due: this kind of thing doesn’t happen just anywhere.