The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

So I’m poking around on the Internet, having heard that the new mayor of Pittsburgh is 26 and being a little curious about that kind of occurrence. (Mayor Bob O’Connor died on September 1, and Luke Ravenstahl had been elected president of the City Council as the compromise candidate, so now whoops! He’s mayor!)

Whilst poking around, I noticed that Mayor Ravenstahl’s chief of staff, the former deputy mayor, is a guy named Yarone Zober.

I recognized the name immediately even though I haven’t thought about him in over 10 years. How do you forget a name like that?

My high school used to have to borrow boys from other schools for its drama program, because it had been an all-girl school and it wasn’t until a couple of years into being co-ed that it had enough boys of its own. So my freshman year, the musical was Little Mary Sunshine, and while we had a second male lead, we were seriously lacking someone who could play Captain Jim (head of the Colorado Mountains Forest Rangers, of course).

Enter Yarone (who had been in a couple of WT’s plays the year before, but that was before my time).

As I recall, he was really quite good. He struck me as a bit of a goof, but he was 18 and the lead, and I was 14 and playing the flute in the orchestra, so weren’t we all a bit silly? I particularly remember him taking off his Forest Ranger hat and tossing it away during a particularly emotional moment. The problem was that the brims made the things like Frisbees so it went flying all the way to the back… and HIT the backdrop, causing the Colorado Mountains to shimmy from the impact.

All of that is really kind of tangential, though. I’m seeing a lot of handwringing about these young kids who supposedly got their jobs by fluke or twist of fate or whatever, and lots of worrying about whether or not they actually know what they’re doing, and honestly, I think it’s crap.

Look, old folks have been running Pittsburgh for years, and you can see where that got us- the city was near bankrupt not too long ago, young people are leaving the city in droves, and to this day, people from out-of-town who visit the place are SHOCKED to discover that it’s actually quite a nice town.

So maybe having some people in charge who happen to be from the demographic that Pittsburgh is having trouble holding on to might be just the thing it needs. It’s not like the “experienced” politicians who have been running the place have done all that much to get excited about. Give the young’uns a chance.

Tom and I were in Pittsburgh this weekend for my cousin’s wedding. There will be photos as soon as I can get iPhoto to stop crashing, and video of my grandparents on the dance floor. It’s a hoot, I promise.

But for now, just a quick story- we had wedding crashers! Two teenage boys, must have been driving by when they saw the sign with “Congratulations Tom and Lisa” on it and decided to crash. (Yes, my cousin is also a Tom. And two of my uncles. Sorry for the confusion.)

These jackasses stroll in all nonchalantly, never mind that they’re wearing shorts and t-shirts in a roomful of people in suits and dresses. They head for the back of the room and sit down. But you can’t put anything past my Aunt Royce, so she heads back, and in her most gracious mother-of-the-groom manner, greets the interlopers and introduces herself. “Hi, I’m Royce, how are you?”

“Hi, I’m Bill, and this is Mark.”

“And who are you with?”

“Oh, we’re with Tom.”

“Oh how nice, and how are you related?”

“We’re cousins of his- Jim’s sons.” It is at this point that I should note that despite our preponderance of Toms, Rons, and Tonys, there’s not a single Jim in our family.

“Oh really? Well, I’m Tom’s mother. Now get the fuck out.”

My dad and uncle followed the guys out to the parking lot to make sure they didn’t vandalize any cars in the lot, and that was the end of that.

My throat is burning. I sound like a frog. I smell like a bar.

And none of the Pittsburgh bloggers in my feedreader have updated since before the game last night.

They’ve all been sleeping it off too.

Pictures to come.

We caught the Superbowl at Shootz Cafe and Billiards in the South Side of Pittsburgh. My darling brother even came out to join us. Fun stuff.

Aside from the obvious, here are my few scattered thoughts on the Superbowl-

- I congratulate the producers of the pre-game entertainment on choosing dancers who look like they have, indeed, had a sammich. Also, while a Motown medley in, well, Motown is a bit obvious, they did a good job of choosing contemporary performers who actually have some talent to sing along with Stevie.

- Someone needs to tell Aretha how horrible that coat looks on her.

- OMG, cigarette smoke makes my throat close up.

- Perhaps if there had been some passes completed by the Steelers in the first quarter, I might not have been so tense.

- Oh Mick, that hip shaking thing you do was hot 40 years ago, but now it’s kind of creepy and dirty-old-man-like. You and the rest of the band (including Animatronic Keith!) can still rock it out, but you need to accept that as Classic Rock Stars, you no longer get to be Sex Symbols. Especially with the way all those substances you abused affected your aging process.

- Could there have BEEN more commercials? And was it just me, or did most of them suck this year? Am a particular fan of the MacGyver Mastercard commercial, though. But the Hummer commercial was just… disturbing.

- And, oh yeah…. GO STEELERS!

When I was in college, Jon Kolb (formerly of the 1970s Steelers) was one of the football coaches at my school. He also worked as a PE instructor, which is how I came to have the following experience.

I was doing a few weeks of Nautilus workouts as part of the freshman PE requirement, and Coach Kolb was the instructor. He was spotting me on one machine because my legs weren’t long enough to let me feet rest securely where they belonged.

So as he was holding my feet down on the footrest, I leaned forward with the weights and saw his hands… “Wow! That’s a Superbowl ring he’s wearing!”

Tomorrow, I’m taking off with Tom, Mike, Amy, and Mary Katherine (who I am apparently the last one to have met) to drive to Pittsburgh to watch the game. We’ll probably watch it in some yinzer bar, perhaps eat some sammiches, and crash for the night before heading back Monday. I’m so excited…

With the Steelers’ playing the Broncos for the AFC Championship this week, I thought I’d share with you this profile of Myron Cope, inventor of the Terrible Towel and the voice of the Steelers for more than 30 years.

Retired broadcaster Cope can still get out a good ‘Double Yoi!’:

Steelers fan hospitalized after fumble | IndyStar.com : We all joked about it, this guy actually did it.

How ’bout those Steelers, huh? “Oh great, the most accurate kicker ever in the NFL is setting up for a field goal…. OMGWTFBBQ!!1!!one!!eleventy-one! WIDE RIGHT!”

Meanwhile, I’m coming down with something- I’ve got a fever and sore throat, and I want chicken soup, but the only ingredients I have are broth and noodles… And it just happens to be during Tom’s week-long business trip out west, so it’s just me and the cats. *sigh*

My blog was down for a bit due to the unexpected expiration of quibbling.net’s domain registration. I say unexpected, because I hadn’t received any noticed about it. It seems that my mac.com address ate the notifications, since it just auto-deletes anything it thinks is spam. Also known as, “Why you should never trust any spam filter that just deletes your mail without showing it to you first.” They have not yet come up with the filter that categorizes my email as well as I do.

I wasn’t planning to renew my .Mac membership anyway- it’s a fine package of services for someone who isn’t interested in spending the time and geekiness to go out and find better alternatives for web/photo hosting, backup space, online bookmarks, etc. But I don’t use it enough to justify the $100/year. Now I note, however, that .Mac is going to be down for a few hours tomorrow, which happens to coincide almost exactly with the time that His Steveness is going to be delivering the keynote at Macworld Expo, which as Tom explains, is a massive and important event in the life of any Mac geek, the day when The Steve displays his blessings to the faithful.

And so I reserve judgment.

And in unrelated news…

OMG GO STEELERS!!!!

Dear Tommy Maddox,

You suck. What happened to you?

Love,
Tiff