I was staying with a friend who was house sitting. The houses owner was some kinda CM philanthropy dude. I was at the breakfast table, hungover, first to the phone and when he said who it was I snapped to attention and just remember frantically looking for something to write on...thinking holy crap, this is Dr. Jonas Salk. Ack!

I met the guy that does the rhyming stock market reports on KYW NewsRadio ... and I went to high school with one of the Shadow Traffic guys (made all my female coworkers jealous ... he worked on radio but looked like he could be on TV).

Nowhere near as cool as talking to Jonas Salk on the phone, though, hung over or not.

Not sure if I would go so far.....
 

as to say beautiful town like one person did.....spent five years out there while in college.....as with all places depends on what your looking to do and all.....

Not as much to do as the home town (philadelphia) but it had it's moments.

Pittsburgh could potentially be a good city, but it won't get there until someone smacks it on the head and drags it there, no matter how much kicking and screaming it'll put up.

How the city gets its revenue is something that needs to get unfucked and quick. I think the statistic is 7 in 10 of Pittsburgh's big businesses (Mellon Bank, PNC Bank, USX, etc. etc.) pay absolutely zero in taxes to the city, because they qualify for one of the fifteen million tax-exempt loopholes on the books. Banks. Pay nothing.

Further, Pittsburgh isn't really so much a city as it is a big town. All the towns around the city - Squirrel Hill, Beechview, Mt. Lebanon, Homestead, etc., etc., etc. - are not neighborhoods within the city limits, they're their own independant municipalities with their own separate police departments, fire departments, EMTs, so on and so forth.

That's one of the real things that irks me - I come out of New York, so I was raised in an environment where the city and county governments were one and the same. NYPD serviced Bayside, Harlem, Downtown, Marine Park, and everywhere in between. I know Los Angeles works the same way, and if I'm not mistaken, so do Philly and San Diego.

It's always been a dream of mine: before I move back to New York, I want to see Pittsburgh annex the surrounding towns, eventually culminating in full unification between the city and Allegheny County. Murrysville, town north of where my mother lives, is nothing but affluent residential and some light commercial zoning. Biggest crime problems are skateboarders and maybe the occasional vandalizer. Yet, because of who lives there, it has the highest-paid police force in the county, and I think second-highest in Pennsylvania. I can only imagine the kind of things that could be done with an addition like that to the tax base. And there are similar towns like it all through Allegheny.

Of course, it'll never happen. Allegheny is, by and large, too racist to merge with the city and too reactionary to even do anything more with additional funds than build new sports stadiums. Sigh...one can always hope.

So basically you want to take money from Murrysville and all those other towns and dump it into Pittsburg? How does that benefit the other towns again?

Philly managed to get its entire county, and it's still not enough. The problems at the center will destroy whatever funds you throw into it, and leave the city wanting even more.

I'll be in Pittsburgh Sunday...I have to make sure I stop at a Primanti Brothers for one of those big-ass sandwiches.

Exactly what condiment does one put on an ass sandwich?

I wouldn't know since I don't kiss ass. :)

Neither do I, but there are a few folks here I bet we could ask.

Bahahaha!

I should stop in York on my way back...