Category: default || By jt3y

I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Chris Potter's "You Had to Ask" column in City Paper. In the latest installment, a couple asks (actually, I guess they had to ask) about local town names like "Freedom, Liberty, Prosperity, Unity and Economy" which (according to them) have a "distinctly Orwellian nature. Was this some wry irony by Frick and Carnegie? Or a 19th-century attempt at branding?"

Potter's answer was right on, as far as I know, until he got to "Liberty," which as Tube City Online readers know, is a suburb of Our Fair City:

Liberty is a more complicated case. As you've no doubt noticed, Pittsburgh has both an East and West Liberty, and Allegheny County also boasts a Liberty Township. But you've probably also noticed that no one in the county seems much freer as a result. What gives?

As our President would say, this sounds like "one of those ex-agg-er-ations." And as a resident of Liberty when it celebrated its Diamond Jubilee in 1987, I felt I must correct the record.

Allegheny County has a "Liberty Borough," not a Liberty Township. And it was so named in 1912, when it split off from Port Vue Borough (named by people who apparently liked the view of McKeesport, but couldn't spell).

I swear I'm not making this up: The residents of what is now Liberty were mad at Port Vue Borough Council, because Port Vue wouldn't extend water lines over to what is now Liberty Borough, which was then mostly farmland.

So the residents petitioned the Court of Quarter Sessions for independence, and got their "Liberty" from Port Vue.

Today, Liberty Borough is mostly known as the home of the Blaine Hill B-B-Q restaurant ("Blaine Hill" being not a person, but a place, and actually located several miles away in Elizabeth Township)

This part, also from Potter's column, I didn't know:

Originally, "liberties" were undeveloped areas on the outskirts of town. Since nobody really owned or used them, anybody could turn their cattle loose for grazing. (Imagine an 18th-century Point State Park, except with a slightly smaller chance of stepping in something nasty when you aren't looking.) Eventually, though, the thieving capitalists came along, as they always do. The land was surveyed and sold off, and places like East Liberty became home to numerous mansions.

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David Levdansky just lost the stoned slacker vote. The longtime Democratic state legislator "doesn't watch cartoons," according to Pat Cloonan in The Daily News:

(A) new animated video released on the Web site of Levdansky's Republican challenger Brad Grantz ... portrays the 39th Legislative District incumbent as a mustachioed pig. To the strains of Stevie Ray Vaughan's rendition of "Taxman," www.votegrantz.com shows how "Lil' Davey" drives recklessly to Harrisburg, has conversations about increasing taxes with the governor, and votes accordingly.

"A" for effort to Mr. Grantz (full disclosure: I know Brad casually and have worked with him in the past, though we're pretty far apart politically) for the video, which has a mid-'60s Chuck Jones vibe. (You need Macromedia's Flash player to view it.)

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President Bush has lost the "furry" vote, and if he's lost "furries," then frankly ... well, he hasn't lost that much:

When the camera crew showed up, we wondered why they were all driving Hummers. Our agent assured us it was a Greenpeace commercial and they paid TWICE our hourly steak rate. Little did we know we were being tricked into this vicious campaign attack ad. (Wolfpacks for Truth)

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Here's how President Bush views the Internets.

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If you're like me, and I pray, for your sake, that you're not, you read the funnies page in slackjawed wonderment. Is there someone out there who finds "The Family Circus" poignant, funny or even interesting? Is there anyone who thinks "B.C.," which was originally about cavemen but now apparently is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, is trenchant? Is "Spider-Man," or is it not, the slowest moving comic strip in history?

By the time I'm done with the P-G's funny pages, I'm usually thinking to myself, Well, there went three minutes of my life I'll never get back.

I will admit to occasionally laughing at "Blondie," and even when it's not funny, I like looking at the artwork, which somehow melds 1930s artwork with modern 21st century conveniences and plotlines. It's like a comic strip done by Fritz Lang's delirious little brother.

Apparently I'm not the only one; here are "Excerpts from Dagwood Bumstead's Intervention" (from "McSweeney's" via "Josh Reads The Comics So You Don't Have To":

Blondie, wife: The only thing I hate --- HATE --- more than the eating is the sleeping. I've been reading some things online and I think you have undiagnosed clinical depression. Listen, just because you're asleep, it doesn't mean that life stops. You can take your naps on the couch, you can sleep in a hammock, you can oversleep before rushing off to work. But I have news for you, Dagwood: the world is still here. And you have to face it just like everyone else.