cellio | Entries tagged with pittsburgh

Seasonal food question: What goes well with latkes? I don't mean the sour-cream-vs-applesauce question; I mean: what (dinner) main courses work well with potato pancakes? Suggestions for dairy (or parve) options are especially welcome, but meat is fine too.

We pretty much completed our holiday shopping (for my relatives) last night. Not only did we go to some actual physical stores, but we even ventured into a mall. Haven't done that in years, but the only local instance of a certain store was in the mall, so off we went. It was surprisingly uncrowded. I wonder if that's because shopping is moving online, because we're between waves of shoppers (the ones who were done in October and the ones who will start on December 23), or because people just aren't shopping as much. As a bonus, yesterday featured the good weather for this week.

We did a chunk of our shopping online, of course (we rarely go that long between instances of giving Amazon our money). But sometimes you've just got to see the item in person.

The release of Blake's 7 on DVD has been delayed yet again. Amazon.uk sends the most polite apologies for things beyond their control, in contrast to most US companies. And it's not like they have my money (only my credit-card info), so I couldn't possibly have any complaint against them. I wonder if the BBC's plan to put all their old stuff online will preclude DVD releases. I don't want to watch TV while sitting at my desk; I want to watch it while sitting in the comfy chair in front of the 32" TV.

I've been doing a lot of D&D catch-up in ralph_dnd. One more major missive to go, and then I'll be caught up to where the characters are. I don't usually write fiction, and this is only semi-fiction because it's reaction to events that have occurred in a shared game -- which is probably why I can write it at all. I've never been very good with fiction, but I seem to do ok when I've got hooks into a set of characters.

I've been meaning to write a proper review of The Kiruv Files for a couple weeks now, but I probably won't get to it this week either. Next week, maybe. If I keep saying that, it'll be true eventually. :-)

Tonight's commute featured ugly traffic snarls. There was an accident on 376 that closed the road in both directions for a while; I don't use that highway, but there was spillover. What surprised me was where the spillover was; after sailing through what I thought would be the worst part, I spent 15 minutes going about two blocks near my house. Unfortunately, those two blocks were right after the point where I could have made a better decision. Oops. :-) (Mind, the accident was around 4:00, and I was doing this after 6:30...)

( retreat, election )

We all know that, in order to get a driver's license, you have to pass a written test and a road test. It appears that in order to renew a license, you have to pass a navigation test. PennDOT will not, as a matter of policy, share the phone numbers of the testing centers -- you only get a street address. So if you need clarification on some aspect of the directions, you have to work it out yourself. This might be funny if they didn't technically work for me.

But does this perhaps signal a new trend in local law? Will the licensing test be enhanced for both giving and following directions? Will Pittsburghers learn which way is north? Will the age-old question of whether alleys count when counting blocks be answered? Will people flunk the test if they give directions that include the phrase "where [something] used to be" or use the local (non-mapped) name of a road (e.g. "the parkway")?

I wouldn't hold my breath.

In other news, tonight was the night of cooking quantities of meat in freezable ways. I had rescued most of the meat from the freezer last night (except for some dubious chicken that I tossed), which meant I had to cook it today. Cue the crock pot of BBQ chicken, the meatloaf, and the sauteed ground turkey with cranberries and apples. (This last was what we ate tonight, and was improvised around the theme of "what usually goes on or in turkey". It needed gravy, I think.)

I am told that our fridge was a very good one -- in 1965. Time to start paying attention to sales, I think. It's functional for now, though.

We also had an On the Mark practice tonight. I think the three of us are going to sound good at Darkover. It won't be as rich a mix as we're used to (with only three people), but there's a lot to be said for working with the same people for twelve years. I can say things like "do something frilly with the flute here" and get exactly what I was looking for out the other end. :-)

(OTM would normally have been tomorrow night, but got pushed by a D&D game which in turn was pushed by Thursday's board meeting on a non-standard night. If I had remembered that choir would be cancelled last night, I might have been able to jiggle things to not miss tonight's dance workshop. Oops.)

I guess I'm not a real Pittsburgher after all. Last week one of my turn-signal bulbs burned out, and it was bugging me so much that I stopped to get it replaced on the way to work today.

For some people, the bulbs die from neglect. Mine actually died from use...

The city of Pittsburgh recently installed a high-tech pay toilet a few blocks from where I work. Some of my coworkers went to check it out today. One of them told me that when you pay your quarter and go in, you get a count-down so you can't stay in there all day. (I don't know if the door automatically opens at the end, or what. Actually, I'll bet I know -- the coworker told me that it hoses itself down after each use. That might be incentive to leave promptly.)

The timer is set for 20 minutes.

20 minutes? Who requires 20 minutes? I mean, I know people who would probably carry a six-pack in there, sit down, and process most or all of it in 20 minutes... maximizing the value of the money spent and all that, y'know.

I'm a bit dubious that this toilet will solve the problem it's intended to solve, which is lots of urination in the streets and alleys around a bunch of bars. I'd guess that the people who are too drunk or too inconsiderate to go back into the bar to use the toilet are also too drunk or inconsiderate (or cheap) to insert a quarter into a coin slot. But we'll see, I guess. It would be nice if it worked out.

A quiz: You are approaching a ramp for a turn -- that is, traffic only enters that ramp from the direction from which you are coming, and there's a gentle turn with plenty of exposure. A police car is parked on the far side of the ramp (where the road you're on continues). There is plenty of room to enter the ramp behind the police car. Someone is sitting in the car. There are no cones, flares, blockades, or the like behind the car.

Is the ramp closed?

I couldn't tell, so I pulled up to the beginning of the ramp (to get out of traffic), put on my blinkers, and started to get out of the car to go ask. Before I got that far, a police officer jumped out of the car and started yelling at me, saying things like "don't you know that when a police car blocks a road that means it's closed?". I said "I couldn't tell if you were trying to block this road, and was coming to ask". (Note: I did not say "So why didn't you park on the part of the ramp that oncoming traffic would actually drive on?" or anything of the sort, though it's a fair question.) The officer continued to be rather rude, and it took me a little while to learn that the entire bridge, not just this ramp to it, was closed. Good thing I asked.

Now to the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life been anything but exceedingly polite and deferential when it comes to dealing with police officers. For that matter, I strive for quite a bit of courtesy when dealing with people in the service industry in general -- mostly because they deserve it until proven otherwise, and partly because of enlightened self-interest. Most of the time, people in the service industry are at least civil, if not polite, to their customers, until circumstances dictate that some other approach is called for. But somehow, in my limited experience, the local police officers seem to be an exception; this isn't the first time that one has started out rude without provocation. It bugs me, because they wield additional power that, say, the clerk at Giant Eagle doesn't wield, and they have a corresponding obligation to use that power wisely. Instead, people like today's specimen use it as license to act like jerks. (And, for those who are wondering, this is anecdotal evidence that this happens to people who aren't members of the commonly-profiled groups, too.)

And a second-order gripe: as I learned later, the Birmingham Bridge was closed at 9:00 this morning because it was icy. (So that police car had been there for a couple hours, at least.) Roads began to get icy at 10:00 last night; where the hell were the salt trucks and snow plows during those 11 hours? There was no snow falling this morning; that bridge should have been ice-free before the morning rush hour ever started.

My tax dollars at rest, I guess. They're sure not at work today.

I'd like to dedicate this paragraph to the anonymous twit who tried to run me down on Saturday: Yo. You are required to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. Especially when they have walk signals and you have red lights. Especially when you have a "no turn on red" sign. Sheesh. Don't make me think longingly of carrying disposable projectiles in my pockets. (Mmm, snowballs. Too bad I can't pitch. :-) )

Friday night was cold. I am glad to have a nice, long down-filled coat with a hood. If it didn't have fur (presumably fake) around the hood, which gets in my eyes when the hood is pulled tight, it'd be perfect. But it's still a great coat for walking to shul in weather like this. It's overkill for anything that involves going from the warm house to the warm car to the warm destination.

Saturday night we went to my company's holiday party. We missed "Santa", which was fine with me. (The party started at 4, but dinner wasn't until 6 so I could safely wait for the end of Shabbat.) The food was good, and there was plenty for vegetarians to eat. I introduced Dani to lots of people whose names he'll probably forget. :-) As far as I know the one co-worker did not actually engage him in conversation in Hebrew. There was no band/DJ, which meant it was actually possible to converse. I appreciate that.

This morning we bought gifts for my niece and nephew. We wanted to visit a couple stores on Craig Street and weren't sure if they would open at 11 or 12, so we erred on the late side. It turns out that most places there open at 1 on Sunday. Oops. That possibility had not occurred to me; I figured that anyone who was open on Sunday at all would be open by noon. So we "had" to spend some time in Barnes & Noble before going back. :-) (The second attempt was successful.)

I've posted some more in-character journal entries in ralph_dnd.

The contractor should be coming tomorrow, so with luck I'll have an office I can move into in a few days. Now, to find some energetic folks to pay to shlep furniture and boxes upstairs....

Last night, on the way home from D&D, traffic was at a stand-still on the parkway. We found this out just after you have to commit to the on-ramp, when we rounded a bend and found stopped traffic and some people vainly tryint to back up. (They weren't the rear-most people.) We still had the option to get onto the parkway in the other direction, so we did -- and saw that traffic was backed up and apparently stopped on the other side much of the way to the next exit. We eventually got turned around and took an alternate route home.

(We called Ralph from the car in an attempt to warn other people not to try the ramp, but we missed. I hope Mike bailed the way we did.)

(We were curious about how far in the other direction this continued, and I speculated that there was an accident in the Squirrel Hill tunnel and we would see no traffic coming out the other end. But we didn't go look.)

This morning I tried to find out what it was by going to the web site of a local paper and looking at the local news. Their site navigation is pretty bad -- they have a "city news" section, but I actually had to go to the "east" section (not a subsection of "city") to find this news. (The city section did contain other eastern-city news.) Eventually I found it: there were two accidents, one at Edgewood before the tunnel and one (yes) in the tunnel half an hour later. Apparently this started at about 9pm, and traffic started moving at about 11. Ugh.

Today's email included spam for a product that will "thicken [my] penis". I think I'll pass. That's even weirder than the Viagra spam and the spam addressed to African-American women (in which category I do not fit).

Today was the Great Race, which starts pretty much in front of our house. I can live with the necessary sound, once a year, of a few thousand people getting set up to run a race. However, blasting music for more than an hour (starting at 8am) at volume levels that would get me cited for disorderly conduct if they came from my house is inappropriate. I wonder who the correct body is to complain to. (City council?)

I guess this race just has bad karma for me or something. In 1999, the first year we lived here, Dani and I got tickets (and threat of towing; someone rang the bell at 7am) for being parked on the street. The "no parking" signs were apparently invisible that year in our block. Dani paid the ticket; I went to traffic court and the judge dismissed it. (After: "And how long have you lived in Squirrel Hill?" "We moved into the house 10 days before this happened." "Ok, dismissed. Just so you know, they do this every year and they're not real good about signs." I didn't ask if there was something the courts could do about that deficiency.)

( Simchat Torah )

( Coronation )
We picked up a different universal remote today. It claims to support a Sampo DVD player. I successfully configured it for the TV and two brands of VCR. I configured it for the DVD player using the provided code (which matches the one we found via google and that didn't work for the other remote), and it didn't work. I wonder if there's something wrong with the player -- its own remote works fine, though, so probably not. With the first remote, the "try all codes" feature didn't turn it up either. I haven't tried it with the second yet. (The second is the better remote in many other ways, though, so I know that's the one we're keeping.)

Hello, driver of what appeared to be PAT bus #3221 on Tuesday evening. Let's talk about traffic laws.

When you are making a left turn onto a bridge with two lanes going in the direction you want to go, and the oncoming traffic is also turning onto that bridge, the usual convention around here is that you turn into the left lane and the oncoming traffic turns into the right lane. In fact, I think there are even laws about that. Have you heard of traffic laws? Indicators like a solid white line between those two lanes should be surperfluous, though note that this line was in fact present on the bridge onto which you turned yesterday.

Also, when you want to go somewhere that is already occupied by other traffic, your only real option is to wait your turn. Barreling down on cars or trying to run them off the side of a bridge is not acceptable.

Further, we have a quaint custom here called "speed limits". Yes, I know that people often exceed them, and there is an unspoken convention of permitting violations up to 10mph. Had you been going as slowly as 45mph in a 35mph zone, or had you not been trying to run innocent bystanders off the side of a bridge, I wouldn't even bother to bring this up.

You got lucky this time. First, you didn't hit anyone, and second, either PAT's database has missing entries or the driver who called to report you somehow managed to mis-remember your bus number. (She never got the route number, because she wasn't willing to chase you at 50 or 55 in a 35 zone.) So you have managed to remain anonymous, this time.

Unless, of course, one of the other eyewitnesses to your attrocious behavior was able to spot more information and call it in. It's a pity that I will never know; I would sleep better knowing that you are enrolled in a remedial-driving program.

Sincerely,
an innocent bystander with zero moving violations; bet you can't say the same

The Tribune-Review (a local newspaper) has been going on at length about alleged bias in the county's jury-selection process. Why? Because X% of the county is black, but only Y% of jury candidates are (where Y < X). Obviously (ahem), this is because of bias on the part of those who decide whom to call for jury duty.

Their investigation didn't turn up any patterns of systematically ignoring certain neighborhoods. They did note that if a jury summons bounces they don't do anything about it, because they don't have the manpower. The paper asserts that blacks in Allegheny County are more likely to rent than whites are, so they move more often, so these mailings bounce more.

The jury pool is drawn from the rolls of registered voters and licensed drivers. I'm not sure if being both of those doubles your chances compared to someone who is only one of those. The oh-so-detailed invesigative reporting didn't include that issue.

However, voter registration is free, so anyone who wants to be considered for jury duty can trivially enter the pool. And for both voter registration and DMV records, you are required to update your info within something like 30 days of moving. I once got a jury summons about 6 months after I had moved, at the new address, so I know the records get updated.

But all of that aside, the Trib seems to have latched onto the notion of a "jury of one's peers" as a basis for arguing that whites can't judge blacks and vice-versa. ( Here's my letter. )

One of the buildings next to our house is a small apartment building (remodelled house) with a business on the first floor. I've never seen the landlord and don't know if he even lives in the city. Everything else on the block is pure residential, mostly single-family homes. (There's one duplex.)

The guys who take care of the lawn for the apartment have an annoying habit of going off early in the morning. That lawnmower is loud, and our bedroom is on that side of the house. (And changing that isn't feasible, really.)

So this morning on my way to work I stopped by for a friendly chat. I laid on all the diplomacy -- and got told, essentially, to shove off. The guy in charge (an older fellow with a heavy Italian accent who refused to share his name) said -- unprovoked, in my opinion -- that "there's nothing you can do to us because we can start making noise at 7am".

I disbelieve, but the city zoning code is awkwardly written so I can't tell. It also specifies noise level limits in decibels, which makes me wonder what gadget I could acquire that would measure that. Different parts of the code give limits of 45db and 55db, and I'd bet that this lawn mower violates at least one if not both. (And that's through windows, but the code says you measure at the property line so it would be even worse outdoors.)

I don't want to have a fight with my neighbors; I tried very hard to avoid appearing at all confrontational this morning, and I think the reaction I got was the worker's problem, not something I did. I guess the next step is to track down the owner and write a very nice letter asking if he could please have his workers come later. Meanwhile, though, I should arm myself with the relevant facts

Current Mood: tired

Pittsburgh doesn't have spring and fall. It simulates them by dithering winter and summer. (Source unknown)

An observation from last night's attempt to find the shiva house (only in Swisshelm Park, for crying out loud): when Mapquest's alternate reality meets Pittsburgh's ideas of navigation, Odd Things Happen. I still don't know where I was or quite how I got there, but I learned on the way out that there was a less-circuitous route. (This is Pittsburgh, so it wasn't straightforward.)

Mapquest is often good, but some miracles are beyond its limits.

Monica

short takes

Tuesday

misc updates

driving in Pittsburgh

relief for the south side?

Pittsburgh's finest (I didn't say at what...)

weekend

traffic and site navigation

weekend

open letter to an anonymous bus driver

jury selection

noise

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