Where Was I?

Sorry for the gap in posting as I've been quite occupied with work, Springtime, and... uh... other things. I was in Florida following a... uh... business transaction that went sour for my partner. Then I was trying working on... um... a project with Pitt regarding... uh... campus emergency readiness. After that I was in Columbia on a... erm... procurement assignment for the Secret Service. And... uh... After that I arranging... um... secret... meetings between Governor Corbett and a... prostitute. No, wait: lobbyist.

But all of those assignments are done now, so I should be ready to start fresh tomorrow.

A Brief Aside

I was busy all night making a fennel and onion tomato sauce* so I didn't have time to write anything of substance. Plus, I finished off a bottle of Shiraz by myself, so I'm roughly as competent as any random State legislator at this point.** So, for the next thirty seconds or so I'm going to type strange words just to fill up space.

Bingle bongle dingle dangle lickey-doo lickey-da ping pong lippy-tappy too tah.

And Number 23: I don't want to eat a pear.

And that fulfills our blogging quota for the day.

Goodnight.

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*Oooh. Look 'e's multi-dimensional! Fancy that!
**If that doesn't scare the willies out of you, nothing does.

A Bureaucrat's Aside Re: Marcellus Shale

If Doug Shields really wants to break down the will of those that are supporting drilling in the Marcellus Shale, he really just has to challenge them to an open-ended debate. By hour 165, the opponents will still be trying to get a word in edgewise.

Although, if subjected to Doug's notorious verbosity, methinks that the shale may frack itself, just to put itself out of its misery.

A Bureaucrat's Aside Re: Immigration and Arizona

By now everyone's already heard about Arizona's new xenophobic... I mean anti-constitutional... I mean anti-illegal immigration law, and if you're on the right or left, you're probably mad. If you're on the left, you're concerned about racial profiling, the usurping of Federal prerogatives to protect the border, and increased debt to the State Government. If you're on the right, you're concerned about brown people that talk funny.

Now, what this law effectively does is require anyone who seems to be "illegal looking" to present their papers proving that they are, in fact, a United States Citizen. While this may be an effective cliche in most WWII or Cold War movies, it's probably only going to be effective at driving illegal immigrants deeper underground.

I mean, it's not like the state would do anything sensible like, say, enforcing or enacting laws that severely punish employers that use illegal labor... but I digress.

But, there's only one way to fight this kind of stupidity: massive performance art.

I propose relocating the entire population of Puerto Rico to Arizona. Remember, Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a U.S. Territory, are citizens of the United States... even though they're brownish and speak some crazy fast moon people language. That's almost 4,000,000 (well, not "immigrants" and certainly not "illegal"... so "migrants" or "commuters", I suppose) to perplex and confound state police.

Trust me: I have deep suspicions that the average cop in Arizona knows that there's a *West* Virginia. "Puerto Rico" will blow their minds.

As part of Phase II of the plan, I'll start importing Canadians from October-March, returning them when the Great White tundra thaws out. That's right: illegal white people, legal brown people.

It'll be chaos and next thing you know, they'll elect a Senator who wasn't born in the United States.

Pause for Station Identification

If anyone seems to think that things are a bit, um, slow around here, well, they are. At least we seem to think they are.

Between fits of writers block, two feet of snow on our front porch, the olympics, and general winter malaise, it's been hard to write anything of substance. We've been wracking our brains to find something funny out there (like how today's PG perp walk picture of Jeff Reed looks like Luke Ravenstahl and Yarone Zober had a freak love-child and then peed on it), but we're really just grasping at straws here.

Last week we seriously considered changing formats to a cooking/horticulture/knitting/cat blog or, alternatively, starting up an ADB Twitter feed to satisfy our "Flowers for Algernon" -like diminishing attention span.

Perhaps when spring finally rears its head, we'll find our muse again.

Until then, expect either total crap or delicious recipes.

A Bureaucrat's Aside Re: Watchdogs

Given the news that a whole lot of the City's surplus has kinda gone AWOL, does the Mayor think that it's OK for the local media to look into that story a little bit more, or is he secretly hiding the funds on purpose "just to prove a point that they need to be more responsible"?

Maybe it got arrested at a Steelers game, flew off to New York with Ron Burkle, and hired a lawyer to stop people from asking questions.

A Bureaucrat's Aside Re: XLIII + 6-8 in.

You know, I hadn't really thought about it as I was busy digging myself out from what seemed like a metric ton of snow, but if the Steelers had won the Superbowl this year instead of last, we would have had a massive street party on Sunday and a victory parade sometime this week.

Consider the implications of that random thought for a minute as you shovel your driveway.

And Now...

H/t to Bram, who played the Gremlin once or twice to the local Looney Tunes establishment.

I give him three months until he returns.

A Bureaucrat's Aside Re: Massachusetts

If there's a silver lining out there for what happened tonight in MA, it is this:

In 1994, after the "Republican Revolution," President Bill Clinton, saddled with a floundering attempt to reform health care, finally got his act together and started running a permanent campaign. While what resulted was a policy that pleased neither the right nor the left, the sudden shock after years of Democratic complacency added a new vigor to an otherwise moribund party.

What the Democrats can learn tonight is that the Race is never going to be over, no one can afford to sit on their laurels, good candidates must be identified early and effectively run, the Party must always be on the offensive, and that the base needs to be permanently energized.

Oh, and it's good that they have the chance to learn all this now and not 10 months from now.

A Bureaucrat's Aside Re: False Fire Alarms

Would whoever keeps burning toast in the Finance Department, has the malfunctioning space heater in CIS, or is smoking on the 5th Floor, please stop it.

You're lucky it was warm out today.

A Bureaucrat's Aside Re: Bitter, Bitter Cold

When I was young, my grandmother showed me old pictures of the Ohio River frozen over, with people walking and skating over it. Granted, at that time, before the locks were installed, the river flowed a bit shallower so it makes sense that it would freeze.

River flows deeper today; still freezes if it's really cold though.

Really, really cold.

Like this week.

A Kennywood Aside

After the last post, I got to thinking: what would be a good name for the Roller Coaster that will be replacing the Turnpike at Kennywood?

I think the answer is obvious: the Mon-Fayette Expressway.

I think the Roller Coaster will have more annual riders though.

A Bureaucrat's Aside Re: G-20 Beautification

Am I the only one that thinks that the easiest way to "redd up" the City during the G-20 is to keep our local elected officials hidden away in an undisclosed location?

I mean, I know that Government is Hollywood for ugly people, but dammmmmn!

Although, we should consider ourselves lucky: Danny and Luke are no lookers, but at least Larry Dunn isn't in office anymore.

A Bureaucrat's Aside

You know, if I was David Souter I would be really happy I actually had a job right now. I mean, with the economy the way it is, it's not like the guy can go off and be a Wal*Mart greeter like Sandra Day O'Connor.

And why do I get the feeling that under his breath Stevens is muttering "damned lazy kids today"?

In Ye Old Garbage Can, Part II

Once again, I'm going to rip off this Blog's polished, hand crafted, Corinthian leather finish, and expose the dark, festering, underbelly of bad ideas, half posts, and things I just got bored with.

Mid October, as the Presidential Election Season was reaching critical mass and John McCain was floundering more than a Disney's The Little Mermaid convention, I was going to comment about McCain's repeated attempts to juice up his campaign in a post tentatively entitled "McCain to Jumpstart Campaign 'Sometime Tomorrow'":

(Reuters) Phoenix AZ - John McCain announced from his couch today that he will begin a jumpstart of his campaign sometime tomorrow.

"My friends, I think that the vast majority of you are sick and tired of the lies coming out of that other campaign. We are beginning a massive overhaul of our message, probably sometime tomorrow, maybe after we watch [The] Simpsons reruns."

The McCain campaign has languished in recent weeks. According to national polls, McCain is behind Obama by as much as 10 points. Anonymous staff persons have pointed to a lack of enthusiasm within the campaign hierarchy and a lack of enthusiasm within the

And that's when I gave up. Who know what I could have written next. "GOP"? "Party"? "Enthusiasm"? The world may never know, and frankly I can't remember where I was going with this.

I think I decided that it wasn't funny enough, so opted to go for something a little more Faustian later in the month.

In late November, I started cobbling together a list of potential cabinet nominees for the newly elected candidate. I opined that "[with] the ongoing housing, financial, energy, weak dollar, auto industry, and overall economic crises, President-elect Obama believes that the country needs someone with a level head who can project confidence in the market and reassure investors."

My nominee for Treasury Secretary was, therefore, Walter Cronkite.

The post had potential, but I got bogged down in the minutiae of cabinet posts, trying to determine if U.S. Trade Representative and EPA Administrator were merely cabinet level posts and should be excluded from the farce.

And, frankly, there's nothing funny about the Secretary of the Interior since Gale Norton.

I tried to start and put a positive spin on City depopulation in April 2007:

So the P-G had an editorial on the recent announcement from those fact-ists over at the Census Bureau that the Pittsburgh Region is continuing to hemorage population. Related commentary can be found here, here, and here, where all the authors miss one key point: depopulation is awesome.

Now what these population pimps will tell you is that the size of the region means a larger share of the tax burden will be borne by fewer people, or it is indicative of the relative health of the region, or

Or something. If nothing else, a loss of population means that there will be fewer and fewer people in the City that know how to spell "hemorrhage" correctly.

An interesting headline that probably had potential: "Cooper Ravenstahl Abducted". It probably would have devolved into some sort of Lindbergh Baby parody, which, in retrospect, would have been in really bad taste. Forgive me for even bringing this up.

And finally, a few weeks ago I nearly posted a Housekeeping item:

So as you can see, the City of Pittsburgh BBI (Bureau of Blog Inspection) finally approved our permit to add a third column onto this site. We're very happy now, as we have more storage for all the miscellany that we've collected over the years and also a second bathroom, which is very convenient for when guests come over.

Of course, we figure that while we're at it, we might as well go a little cleaning, especially on that Blogroll over to the right there, which has been collecting more and more dead links over the last year. That being said, we're putting out a general call for (a) blogs that you folks recommend and (b) attention whores.

I suppose that all of that could have been posted, but for some reason I decided that it was too self-promoting. I don't know what I was thinking: we are still looking for blogs you folks recommend. And whores.

Ah! Catharsis!

rm -i oldjunk

Flotsam & Jetsam

I've been spending some time off hanging around with Boston developers dead for tax reasons recently and I missed one or two or five things. Here's where I try to catch up:

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I'm obviously not the one in charge of the Mayor's schedule, but if I were that person, I would definitely upgrade to Microsoft Outlook instead of Post-It notes strewn randomly in the direction of a calendar. Surely such a change would result in fewer conflicts between Sporting Events and Community Meetings.

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Mark DeSantis (French for "of Santis") has released his proposed economic development plan which, sadly enough, does not included any mention of Scotch. One of the more interesting bits includes a proposed support of Minority, Women, and Disadvantage Businesses through guidance, training and help in raising startup capital.

That's not a particularly bad idea, considering that the City mandates that a certain percentage of contracts go to these businesses and qualified contractors are sometimes hard to find.

If the Mayor was smart, he might consider moving his bugging devices from Bill Peduto's office to DeSantis'. Unless he wants to know the drink prices as Cappy's.

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The Post-Gazette is asking people to submit their questions to a Mayoral candidates forum. Personally, I am interested in what their position on the Picard vs. Kirk debate. Of course, Tony Oliva will probably say "Sisco" and Ryan Scott will say "Janeway."

This, more than anything, is the reason why third party candidates can't be trusted in local political races.

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Oh, and the Mayor released a copy of his $423.8 Million budget proposal last week. Curiously absent from the proposal are line items for Swedish Fish, banjo lessons, and the entire Department of City Planning.

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Bishop Dave Zubik was formally installed as the 12th Bishop of Pittsburgh on Friday, and immediately declared Steely McBeam as heretical and anathema.

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And, I missed "Blogged to Death" last Thursday, because I am not a fan of Greek Tragedy. [Turns out that Ruth Ann Dailey is Tim Menees' sister and mother.]

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And so on.