Welcome to tonight’s Featured Presentation! For your viewing pleasure, “Nighthawks” episodes 1-4 Honestly, each one is better than the one before it (and no, don’t just jump to episode 4…fine, go ahead). Come back this weekend for two more installments of Waffle Shop Week!
Episodes 3 and 4 after the jump.
In today’s show:
(Language NSFW)
Troy Polamalu, as well as Larry Fitzgerald, will be on the cover of Madden NFL 10.
This marks the first time that two athletes have been on the cover of Madden. Kaotaku reports on it here.
Hopefully, the Madden Curse will be exercised by the addition of a second player on the cover.
Waffle Shop has just released episode four of Waffle Show. In this episode:
A couple observations: Didn’t we already see the Farkle video, as part of a preview maybe? Also, I’ve never heard the term before. I’ve heard other words used in place of it, but never that one. Also, I keep hoping that in one of the episodes someone will do a full-on Wash impression from Serenity, but nothing yet, although the scene with the giraffe was quite amusing.
Part one is below, the rest (parts two and three and the interlude) are after the break.
A new website with a ridiculously long URL (http://www.theblackandgoldcitygoesgreen.com) has launched, urging residents of Pittsburgh to go green by taking little steps.
This month’s project: replace incandescent light bulbs with compact florescent light bulbs. I really like CFLs, however, I’ve always been of the mind that you should wait until the old ones burn out, otherwise, aren’t you just needlessly adding waste?
Yeah, the carbon offset is a big pay-off, but maybe instead of replacing, this month you can take the step to purchase CFLs and then as you need them at home, replace.
To join the site you have to live in one of the neighborhoods within the city limits…so I lied a little bit.
Did you know that there are trees being watched downtown? Take a look:
Seriously, no touching. I went to see Wicked, and it was amazing! If you get a chance, check it out, there are still tickets to some of the weekday shows I believe. And for fun, here’s a pic of one of the trees I wasn’t touching:
So Pittsburgh beat Los Angeles yesterday…
…and no, not in sports.
According to the latest American Lung Association report – “State of the Air 2008″ – that determines the nation’s most polluted cities, Pittsburgh has been named the “sootiest in the nation.”
Wow, what an honor.
What is this, the 1970s all over again?
The category Pittsburgh claimed top spot in measures short-term particle pollution, or ’soot.’ However, Janice Nolan, the assistant vice president of national policy and advocacy for the ALA, said that “it’s not that Pittsburgh has gotten worse; it’s that Los Angeles has gotten better.”
Small comfort, that.
Oh, and she said that “if the trend continues, Pittsburgh will top two lists, and LA will only be leading the nation in ozone.”
I see. So if the Steel City just keeps status quo, then we can’t make fun of LA-ites any more for being smoggy people. Great. Not to mention that everyone else in the country will revert back to the post-70’s assumption that Pittsburgh was a dirty, polluted city.
Guillermo Cole, a spokesman for the Allegheny County Health Department, told the Post-Gazette that Pittsburgh didn’t deserve the ranking as the high soot readings come primarily from emissions from U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works. “The fact of the matter is that the ranking only applies accurately to the Liberty-Clairton area, and Pittsburgh, the rest of the county and the surrounding counties have much better air,” Mr. Cole said. “Liberty-Clairton is a unique situation. We have a large source, the coke works, sitting in a river valley, so it’s a real challenge. There’s no other area of the U.S. like that.”
The Liberty-Clairton area does not meet federal air quality standards for soot by far, but neither does the surrounding five-county metropolitan area – though soot levels are lower. Plans are in place, however, to improve the city’s overall air quality, especially for the Coke Works.
U.S. Steel has a $1B upgrade in the works for the site which will put the Liberty-Clairton area into attainment by 2015. The rest of the region should hit attainment by 2010.
Even if the area surrounding the Coke Works was removed from the data, Pittsburgh would still rank in the Top Twenty – 16th, to be exact.
So while the news is indeed hard to swallow, remember this: in traffic and commute, Pittsburgh is the fifth BEST city; L.A. is the ninth WORST. And when it comes right down to it, Pittsburghers get more quality time at home and not lodged on the Parkway inhaling exhaust. (Well, except when the “tunnel monster” is running loose.)
Commute vs. pollution? Yeah, I think Western PA wins that round.
Blast furnaces and iron ore at the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation mills, Etna, Pennsylvania (LOC), courtesy of The Library of Congress
I’m back to writing after taking a few weeks’ break due to travel and a knee injury that’s still being worked up by my fine colleagues at UPMC. To start back up, I’m coming back to a topic that had just hit the front page when I left: air pollution. More specifically, the suggestion from Dan Onorato that Allegheny County could stand to drop our air quality program and let the state’s Department of Environmental Protection take over. THe basic argument is that A) it’s slower than the state would be and B) it’s driving away business by making regulations tougher than they need to be.
As far as part A, follow-up articles suggest that the county agency is about the same speed as the state. So what about part B? Are we being too stringent? Could DEP do the job more efficiently? Well, according to one (admittedly biased) source, PA is currently among the worst states for hazardous pollutants and particulates. As of last year, Pittsburgh continues to lag behind other cities on multiple air-quality metrics. In other words, our state has a problem, *and* Pittsburgh/Allegheny County’s problem is even worse. A county-level agency with a mission to fix our air sounds like the sort of thing we should be paying more attention to, not trying to fob on off the state.
I cannot help but agree with the first letter-writer in Saturday’s PG. Luke Ravenstahl may not have been my first choice for Mayor, but he’s doing a lot of things right in between the PR slip-ups, and overall, I’m still considering letting him have another two years. Or at least, I would be if his friends at the State Democratic Committee would leave me the [beep] alone. There were quite literally three straight days of pro-Ravenstahl/anti-DeSantis postcards yesterday. One card I can tolerate. Three in three days is an annoyance and a sign that someone in Harrisburg doesn’t particularly care about my time or about the number of trees killed in the name of Democratic victory.
Mr. Mayor: the people who Mark DeSantis is trying to peel away are generally the more progressive Democrats/Independents. Most of us are also at least vaguely environmentalist, and we dislike junk mail in all forms. Your State Committee colleagues are hurting your cause, not helping, and it’d be in your best interests to call them off.
The comments that followed the LA Weekly story about parking policies in downtown LA were a lot more thought out than the original piece. Hopefully people won’t mind me pasting in some of the best ones. Obviously, I think the issue is of universal interest and highlights an issue we will have to face. Follow this link to read all the comments. Needless, to say the fact that a much higher percentage of our parking lots are filled with non city taxpayers makes it even more important for us to think about.
“If, for just a few minutes, we turned and shifted perspectives, another story would come from this issue. I disagree with the author that taking away parking is a bad thing; I think this is okay. I think this because it is not about parking – it is about shifting one’s attitude and lifestyle in order to make things better, *in the long run*. My fear right now is that many Angelenos, and Americans in general, only live “in the now” and have a very hard time peering into the future and understanding what our actions today will mean tomorrow. If small villages (per the Gail Goldberg model of planning she created for San Diego) are created throughout our city, then people will (should) no longer have the need to drive 5 miles to a grocery, a cafe, the gym, etc. They would have the opportunity to bike or walk there because those services are just down the street or a few blocks over. Furthermore, if, as our current City Officials hope, neighborhoods become places where mixed incomes live, then more people will be working where they live, and again the need for driving is reduced. In January, I moved from 6 miles away to work to one block. I moved into a place with a co-worker, so we took 2 cars off the road. I bought a bike. I live in Culver City – this neighborhood has EVERYTHING! (the commenter who works here as well can validate that) – and I barely find myself driving at all. If more people had that opportunity and were open enough to changing their lifestyle and understanding the long-term impacts of their decisions, then taking away parking spaces is a non-issue.”
Posted on Friday, August 31, at 10:07 am by Sigafoos
“S.L. Morris sounds like Zahniser now. Since when did my forward-thinking LA Weekly become so repugnantly conservative and West LA centric? It’s embarrassing, actually. Our city is choking on too many opportunties to park and too few opportunities to live, work and recreate. We need less parking and (within walking distance) more services, more amentities, more housing opportunties, more jobs located in the immediate area of where we live, more places to purchase essential services, more public places to spend outdoors. The reason you need to get in your car in the first place is to drive somewhere that is too far to walk. Imagine if instead of having a parking lot twenty feet from your door, you actually had a market located their to buy your groceries. Our open space has been squeezed out to the hills to make room for parking. We work in small cubicles of 25 sq.feet while our cars have 80 to 100 sq. feet of premium real estate to be parked at all day. Many of us are appreciative that we have a civic leadership that is progressive and willing to establish/institutionalize policy that will eventually make for a more sustainable and more livable City. I encourage LA Weekly readers to visit www.parkingdayla.com to see how the other half thinks. Less parking means more parks! Less parking means more opportunities to access just about everything that you otherwise would need to drive to. For all of us out there who are not scared of change, we look forward to a City that becomes more accomodating to people and less accomodating to our machines. Morris’ and Zahniser’s myopic focus on the fact that we have a anemic transit system is misleading. It’s not about the need to get on a bus or a train, it’s about the desire to walk down the block and find what it is you are looking for – a community of people instead of a wall of cars.”
Posted on Friday, August 31, at 11:20 am by W. Wright
“I don’t think the author is realizing the inherent problem with parking. San Francisco’s Planning Department website does a good job of explaining: http://www.sfgov.org/site/planning_index.asp?id=25135 The brief synopsis: 1) It degrades the quality of urban places. 2) It GENERATES traffic. 3) It takes up valuable space. 4) It makes housing less affordable. “No great city is known for its abundant parking supply. If we had to rebuild a place like North Beach (in SF) under today’s parking requirements, as much as a third of the space where people live would be given up for parking. We would lose much of the street life–the shops and cafes, the vendors and the stoops–that make areas like North Beach vibrant and interesting. We don’t build places like these today because we require so much parking. There are plenty of examples of the kinds of buildings our parking requirements result in. We just need to imagine a city composed entirely of these buildings, and ask ourselves if this is the kind of city we want in the future.” I hope this helps to make my point.”
Posted on Friday, August 31, at 4:15 pm by NM
“It’s no wonder LA’s a mess. Los Angelenos like the author of this editorial are completely backwards in approaching city building and transportation planning. Removing parking requirements is “social engineering”? What a birdbrain. Parking requirements ARE social engineering. They subsidize automobile ownership. Do you really think developers are going to not provide ANY parking? Umm.. have you peaked your head outside of that dense layer of brown smog? Most cities that don’t have parking requirements actually have parking maximums because developers choose to provide not just some, but however much parking the public demands. Traditional city planning as we know it has screwed up this city. For once, city planners are taking a step in the right direction by eliminating a huge automobile subsidy.”
Posted on Tuesday, September 4, at 10:57 pm by Jayson
PATransit Tuesday: Horrific “Customer Service”
Mike They were, and we were offered to contact PAT if we had questions about the flyers, which is what started all...
Dean J The flyers were a fake, and were not official; they were put together as propaganda by drivers opposing the...
Empty Forbes Ave
Mike Yeah, most of what I visited today was pretty dead. Apparently, if I wanted to see more people I should have...
Matthew Wow! It looks like a ghost town!
