My local McDonalds, in Pittsburgh's Strip District, recently closed without notice. One day it was serving burgers, then next it had shut up shop. "McDonalds in the Strip closes without explanation," reported Trib Live, which noted McDonalds was still paying rent to the landlord but was not renewing the lease. The landlord has no clear plans for what to do with the plot: it's not because a cookie-cutter development is getting stamped in.
The restaurant was immediately debranded, and now the entire building has disappeared completely, an efficient and rapid demolition leaving a smoothed field of light rubble. The sheer speed with which the structure vanished has locals startled. In Pittsburgh, a building hasn't even gotten started until it's been abandoned to begin a new life as a dilapidated navigational beacon. But look at that! It's as if aliens beamed it right up into the fucking mothership.
I cannot help but recall, however, that Pittsburgh was also the longtime home to a Burger King that lost its franchise but remained in the Burger King building, calling itself Burger King and serving all sorts of fake Burger King meals. For months.
The menu evolved, optimizing the Burger King pantheon of foodstuffs to local tastes and available substitutes. There was at one point, according to local folklore, a quintuple Whopper on offer. The legendary "Open Sauce" Burger King of Pittsburgh continued in business for some time until local reporters cottoned on and ruined it for everyone:
Read the rest
Listed at $159,900 this 1,075 square-foot home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is bland on the outside but features rooms with outer space, submarine, tropical island, and moonbase motifs. The owners put a lot of work into it!
Read the rest
Gregory Priore -- former archivist for Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library -- has pleaded guilty of stealing $8m worth of rare texts from the collection over a 25 year period, fencing them through John Schulman's Caliban Book Shop (Schulman has also pleaded guilty, and admitted to forgery as well).
Read the rest
I've lived in Pittsburgh a clear decade now and the phenomenon of parking chairs is one of the most charming local oddities. Here's a video from Dean Bog about the parking chairs.
Yinz can't park here.
Parking in The Strip shortly after moving to town, I gently shunted a parking chair to make space only for local pedestrians and stallkeepers to crowd around and yell at me like I'd run over a puppy. I backed out of the spot and a man carefully moved the chair back into position, glaring at me all the while. Read the rest
This is an interesting move. Read the rest
Eyewitnesses say the publisher of the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette drunkenly stumbled through the newsroom screaming at journalists, firing them-- and demanded that a photo of him and his daughter be published on the front page. Meanwhile, his daughter screamed, “Please, please Daddy no!” Read the rest
It's really hard to keep up with how weird every news story is right now. The Huffington Post's Jessica Schulberg sums her new HuffPo report perfectly: “Before Robert Bowers killed 11 people in a synagogue, he offered to help the League of the South's Brad Griffin dox a journalist on Gab.” Read the rest
The U.S. will deploy an additional 5,200 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, said White House officials today. The deployment will more than triple the military presence there, and is presumably a Trump administration response to the so-called “Migrant Caravan,” about which white supremacists in the United States are currently fixated. Read the rest
Social network Gab was the online sanctuary of Robert Bowers, the antisemitic killer of 11 Jewish people in Pittsburgh. Gab lost its payment processors Paypal and Stripe over the weekend. On Tuesday, it loses its webhost, Joyent. Godaddy, its domain name registrar, gave it the boot on Sunday. Gab co-founder Ekrem Büyükkaya, who once wrote that he'd be the first to leave if the site was seen to be right-wing, left Sunday.
The Washington Post reports on the origins of white supremacy's online hangout.
Gab is more than a platform. It’s also positioned itself as a key figure in the right-wing response to online crackdowns of extremist views, and has benefited directly from the white supremacists who flocked to Gab on the promise that their views would not be censored, according to Joan Donovan, the media manipulation and platform accountability research lead at Data and Society, who has followed the site’s growth.
Torba has become a charismatic leader of the “alt-tech” movement which, among other things, dedicates itself to protecting and building tech to house “free speech” — including extremist ideologies that are increasingly unwelcome on mainstream sites. When James Damore was fired from Google in 2017 for writing a viral memo about women in tech, Torba capitalized on the case’s media attention to promote an “alt-tech revolution,” where conservative tech workers would rise up and topple Silicon Valley giants. Gab, of course, would be there to take their place.
Gab complains:
Gab.com is under attack.
Read the rest
A gunman killed at least 10 people this morning at a Pittsburgh synagogue, reportedly shouting "All Jews must die" as he opened fire. Social media profiles under the shooter's name illustrate a violently antisemitic extremist who wrote that "there is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation." Asked about gun laws after the massacre, President Trump responded thus, according to CNN's Jeremy Diamond.
"This has little do do with it," Trump says when asked about gun laws in wake of Pittsburgh shooting. Instead, he puts the onus on the synagogue: "If they had some kind of a protection inside the temple, then it could have maybe been a very different situation. They didn't."
Three police officers were in fact shot by the gunman before he surrendered. Read the rest
It's Anthrocon time again -- the annual summer invasion of Steel city by the Fur nation. There'll be fun, costumes, art, screenings, and the amazing sight of a major city's downtown filled with countless fursuited convention-goers.
Anthrocon 2018 will be held Thursday through Sunday at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center ... Costumes are only part of the convention for many of those attending, board member John Cole says in an earlier interview. He adds that Anthrocon is different than, for example, a science fiction convention or Harry Potter convention in that there is no preconceived storyline. Only about 20 percent of Anthrocon attendees partake in costuming. Some write, some draw — it's all about telling a story, Cole says.
An emerging tradition: many Pittsburgh restaurants will serve your meal in a dog bowl.
Photo: Rob Beschizza (CC BY 4.0) Read the rest
Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is one of very few (and apparently the most populous) to publish data on its dog registrations. Nathan Fulton, a student at CMU, offers a summary of Pittsburgh Doggos By the Numbers, though it should be noted that it excludes those within city limits. (With 300k humans in town and a million more out in the burbs, assume we're missing at least a quarter of the doggos)
Ten Most Popular Dog Names in Allegheny County
Name Count
Bella 708
Lucy 474
Buddy 469
Molly 435
Bailey 424
Sadie 398
Max 393
Daisy 370
Charlie 328
Cooper 305
Read the rest
[From 2015]: En garde! Read the rest
More than 48 tons of trash were left by fans of Kenny Chesney attending a concert this week in Pittsburgh—something of a tradition for the country singer. The piles are staggering, the smell appalling: an aftermath so disgusting it has some speculating on how it's even possible to generate so much trash in such a short amount of time. It's almost as if it was trucked in and left there to make a point...
As the concert let out around 10:30 p.m. and cars began to clear from the parking lots, a reeking, hulking mass of garbage leftover from the day’s earlier festivities began to appear behind the exodus of country music fans.
Pickup trucks crunched glass bottles underneath tires; fluid from portable toilets overflowed into the street; people covered their noses with their shirts to escape the stench.
"You're just walking around on a carpet of garbage." Dozens of drunks were hospitalized and several people arrested, reports the Post-Gazette.
The tonnage is a record, apparently; a Billy Joel concert was attended last weekend by a similarly-sized crowd without event. Read the rest
Last year, Pittsburgh Police officer Sgt. Stephen Matakovich was captured on camera beating up a 19-year-old outside Heinz Field. After lying about the circumstances, he was charged with assault—only to find the charges dismissed last week by a judge.
When video of the attack found its way to the media, however, the story changed: police chief Cameron McLay has now suspended Matakovich and says he will fire him, while prosecutors are planning to refile charges against the officer.
WPXI 11 reports that it'll be hard to make it stick: Matakovich can appeal the decision to city executives who can overrule McLay, then take it to an arbitration panel, where he can select one of the three people tasked with the final decision.
Deja vu: in 2003, Matakovich was recorded threatening to assault a superior officer, but was let off the hook over his own supervisor's objections. Read the rest
Only after assault charges against Pittsburgh police Sgt. Stephen Matakovich were dropped did the public get to see the video of him beating up a teenager.
The off-duty cop, working as a security guard, claimed that 19-year-old Gabriel Despres kept his hands in his pockets after being ordered to remove them and was therefore a "threat."
A judge agreed Monday that Despres was the aggressor and dismissed the charges against Matakovich, reportedly to cheers among police gathered in the courtroom.
But now the FBI plans to review the case after the video of the Nov. 28, 2015 incident outside Heinz Field was posted online.
Though Matakovich also maintained that Despres lunged at and punched him, the video shows otherwise. The grainy footage depicts Matakovich shoving Despres to the ground and launching a series of punches to his head. Despres lifts his arm at one point to shield himself from the blows, but does not appear to retaliate or resist.
It's not Matakovich's first time in the news: in 2003, he was videotaped threatening to beat up a superior officer on the Pittsburgh Police force, but was let off the hook despite protests from his own commander.
Word of the review came a day after a district judge dismissed charges against Sgt. Stephen Matakovich, a 22-year veteran, who had been accused of using unnecessary force in taking down Gabriel Despres, 20, of South Park.… District Justice Robert Ravenstahl’s decision Monday to dismiss charges of simple assault and official oppression against Sgt.
Read the rest
Created by a team from Pittsburgh's Techshop makerspace, the Origami uses a novel, fold-out arm that lets you laser-etch and -cut much larger designs than you could get into a normal, enclosed cutter. Read the rest
