nah pop, no style

Before I get down to it for REAL, let me pass along this piece of information, from the P-G, via Subdivided because goodness knows I never actually read the business briefs:

A crispy plan to expand

Dunkin’ Donuts apparently has spotted a huge hole in the Pittsburgh market. The Massachusetts-based purveyor of doughnuts, coffee and other baked goods said yesterday it reached the largest store development agreement in history, signing a deal with Heartland Coffee Co. of Pittsburgh for 105 restaurants in Allegheny County in the next several years. The first new stores will open at undisclosed locations within 18 months, the company said. There currently are 10 Dunkin’ Donuts in the Pittsburgh area.

I could not be more excited about this plan. Not trusting Giant Eagle, and living in a neighborhood whose bakery recently vacated (though apparently the DeFlavios may restore us to bakery-hood status yet), I do lament the loss of many Dunkins. I could get behind them putting one in with the ol’ controversial Walgreen’s that I think it still slated to go in down by Penn and Braddock.

What has Andy been up to? What will Andy be up to soon? What are things that Andy might recommend? These are all questions you probably haven’t been asking yourselves, but which will be answered in this post!

Tuesday night was HTML’s next-to-last show for now; it was at GA with Mika Miko and Kill the Unicorn and Flotilla Way. FW sounded amazingly good at this show; don’t let it be said that everyone sounds horrible at the GarfArt! HTML makes me happy and their passing will be a sad event. Their last show is Saturday night at Roboto with Allies and Aydin and Rick. It’s a benefit for some fair-trade coffee folks, so that’s good.

Wednesday night, Team Unapologetically Toothsome were soundly pummeled at pub quiz; it was a bad week for us but we’ll be back, I promise you that. We will show up massively early next week, redeem our free appetizer from last week, and mop the floor with those other teams with clever before-and-after names.

Last night I drank wine and watched Becket. I love Richard Burton. Although I wish Liz Taylor would show up at least once in EVERY film he was in. It would make things fun. I think she could’ve played, like, the Bishop of London in this one or something. Oh well.

Tonight, the triumphant return of Tamburo and Tusk Lord, along with Nick Shillace and Weird Josh “Beyer.” That’s at ModernFormations. Tomorrow night, said HTML show at Roboto. Sunday, who even knows.

Also, a heads-up: if you’re someone I know in the Carrboro-Chapel Hill-Raleigh-Durham area, I will be near you in two weeks: September 5 through September 9. Reach out, make a connection, buy me drinks, whatever. Also tell me about what’s going on that weekend besides the Reach for the Skye benefit at Cat’s Cradle.

Excited as I am about the cooling-off and the rain (though I wish I would’ve gotten my fall garden planted last week), I am MOST excited about this weather, apparently happening right now in the Pittsburgh area:

“Thunder in the Vicinity” should’ve been the name for the 4th of July fireworks this year, since they had to have everyone on the South Side because the Point was closed . . .

The past weekend, in a nutshell:

• Friday night, dined at Taste of India (perennial fave) with friend Alex (another perennial fave) then went to GA to see Eli Keszler and Ashley Paul. Was feeling exhausted and kind of beat-down in most ways, so I feel bad but I didn’t introduce myself or anything. They were really moving and awesome; Eli played drums and did a little guitar work, Ashley played clarinet and saxophone and did some electronics stuff and amazing vocal work that was at times pretty chilling. I liked the sax parts least (especially because they felt kind of crammed-in at the end there) and the vocal parts most but they all worked together well. Recommended if they’re coming your way.
• Saturday, did my (bit) part in the new Wrestling Team episode. Fun times; I’ll let you know when it comes out so you can watch for my big line. Also Jaimie getting bloody eyes.
• Watched the Steelers game with the father.
• Went to the new Half Price Books and grabbed a few books and records. Failed to double check ONE record and it was the one that turned out — no joke — to have the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack within, instead of Hall & Oates’ Rock ‘n Soul Part One. Sigh.
• Made some baked spiral pasta with Gimme Lean faux sausage and mozzarella, and also baked zucchini bread. Made a menu for this week’s dinners in hopes that knowing ahead of time what I want to make would encourage me to actually make dinners. The cooler weather is also inspiring me to want to cook more. Thank goodness for that.

I forgot to do the thing where I link you to the things I wrote for this week’s paper. So:

Geoff Farina/Glorytellers: I didn’t end up getting an interview in time and the show was last night so whatever, a lot of good reading that one’ll do you.  If you bother, look out for the one completely tangential paragraph in which I start to discuss lyricism in a theoretical manner. That’s good for a laugh.

Eli Keszler/Ashley Paul: This show is tonight, so there’s still a chance to go. Short article, I could’ve written more as I pulled off something of an interview for it.

Welcome to panel one of today’s Amazing Spider-Man.

Seriously, guys, do it. Your wives will appreciate it.

The news that PennDOT has decided to release ratings information about the state’s steel deck truss bridges will hopefully herald a few changes in our everyday lives. Besides knowing that the DOT is confident in our bridges, or at least claims to be. Which doesn’t mean much.

First and foremost, this hopefully means that the TV news channels (okay, I can only indict WPXI here really because I don’t watch the other two that often*) will stop going out and taping PennDOT crews inspecting and repairing bridges across the region and acting as if this is all part of the Minnesota bridge collapse windfall when in fact PennDOT insists that the inspections were already scheduled and are part of their routine. Yes, I’m pretty certain that they’ve been inspecting bridges for quite a long time; soon I’m hoping we can go back to the old way of life, in which we ignored that part of the equation because it’s not exciting, and hoped that they would actually close/fix the bridges that were in really bad shape.

Additionally, I’m hoping that this increased awareness of bridge rating information will encourage more and more of us to rate our own belongings and those of others along similar lines. For example:

• My laptop computer is about an 8 on a scale of 0 to 9 (they made up the scale, not me, folks) but if I continue getting food and stuff on it at the rate I have been, it could end up structurally deficient within a year or so.
• Structurally, my Walkman is completely sufficient, but some might argue that a cassette player is by nature functionally obsolete in 2007.
• My blue Red Kap work pants with the paint on them and the hole in the knee score a 3 for surface appearance, a 4 for function, and have an overall sufficiency rating of about 38.

* I can’t get KDKA very well from where I am, and while I get WTAE pretty well, a combination of habit (we used to only watch WPXI at the old house), a desire for continuity, and the pure entertainment that’s ensued since they installed a new production system nearly two months ago keeps me coming back. There’s little else like watching Fedko talk about Barry Bonds while a graphic about flooding sits on his shoulder.

Back in the late ’80s, when I was a wee one, my eldest sister liked going to Vincent’s Pizza Park in Forest Hills, and my mother didn’t appreciate us going there. Beyond the oceans of grease and the legendary cigarette ash topping, Vincent’s was rather shady — I don’t really know how you could fight, or even really get mad at someone, around that much pizza, but I guess there’s also a lot of beer there.

In 2007, there’s not so much in the way of cigarette ash, nor brawling, but Vincent’s is still the place in Pittsburgh for a huge, greasy, disgustingly great pizza. Thus, Friday evening, Brian, Thiago and I headed for the pizza park. (Seriously. Pizza “park”? Who came up with that? I expect a pizza park to have teeter totters in the vomitorium or something, but whatever.)

We split a small, one side with green peppers and the other side with pepperoni. They don’t skimp on toppings here; in addition to the copious amounts of grease, there were probably three green peppers on there, and a couple pigs as well. (Note to good vegetarians: if you split a pizza and get meat on half, the line is going to be very blurred. This goes for everywhere, but especially Vincent’s. I’m not a great vegetarian, so it’s cool.)

On a Friday night at Vincent’s, service won’t be horribly prompt, but that’s not really the main concern. There are a lot of people there, and you’re drinking beer, and everything’s cool. You will eventually get a bigass pizza that enlarges your stomach when you ingest it. You will sit under the old posters and newspaper clippings about local sports achievements, and you’ll have trouble with your Roman numerals when discussing Super Bowls. You will look at that mug shot of a young Sinatra and mistake it for a mug shot of a young Charles Manson and think about how great it would be to open a pizza shop with pictures of serial killers adorning the walls.

And when it’s all over you will take off eastbound on Ardmore Boulevard, rock down to Electric Avenue, and loop around, content with the contents of your belly, wondering why you didn’t bring a camera with which to document this for the blogosphere.

Vincent’s Pizza Park
998 Ardmore Blvd, Forest Hills
412-271-9181

Despite finding that I’m basically out of money until Wednesday, I decided to go to Jerry’s Saturday. The haul:

Jonathan Edwards, S/T.
Christian dude who plays guitar and writes really cute songs: not Sufjan Stevens, Jonathan Edwards. “Sunshine” is now being used in a Jeep commercial, apparently. Not sure why I felt it necessary to pay $7 for the German import (other than that the only other copy on the shelf that day was a $10 mint etc. etc. edition).

ELO’s Greatest Hits
A perennial Torley Street favorite that I hadn’t gotten my own copy of yet. I think there was a skip in there somewhere :( I’m not a very good record shopper.

Milemarker S/T 7″ (Image not available) (the one with the bloody wisdom teeth on the front).
I like some Milemarker: Frigid Forms and Satanic Versus both have some great tracks. This is their first 7″ and it’s kinda lame. I feel okay saying that because when my band played in Chicago, the best thing that Al had to say about us was: “That was loud.” (I told him that’s what we aimed for; he said we were successful.)

Alpha Control Group (C)/Photon Band Split 7″
Chumpire release from 2003, another record that was around at the old house but that I figured I’d pick up. There were actually a whole bunch of seven inches from the past 5-10 years of Pittsburgh rock in the new punk seven inches bins . . . Io (black vinyl), Sequoia (the original version of the band), etc. etc. Also, the entire Cynics catalog.

Born Against/Universal Order of Armageddon Split 7″
Gravity release #5, from 1993. Pretty straightforward. You know what it sounds like. Good stuff. I wish that I had instead found the Sam McPheeters-as-Patrick Henry 5″ though.

Lungfish/Tinklers Split 7″ (Simple Machines Working Holiday #2 — February)
I thought this one was a pretty cool find. It was part of a series of seven inch splits that Simple Machines put out in 1993 — others included a Codeine/Coctails split and a Bratmobile/Veronica Lake split. Lungfish offers “Abraham Lincoln” on the disc, in commemoration of the old guy’s birthday in February.

- If the name you choose for your football team’s mascot sounds like a cross between a tribute to your city’s industrial past and a paid promotion for the new season of a mid-’90s anorexic lady lawyer TV show on DVD, you will disappoint business professors AND cause frat-lookin’ dudes from the South Hills to make demands.