That's Church

1. I need a vacation. Christmas week cannot come soon enough for me to hop my flight to Texas to spend a week having my sister (Tina Fey) cook for me and shop with me.

2. As reader M wrote, “All over Pittsburgh, people will be adding “elbow gloves” to our Christmas lists.”

Boys, Sonni Abatta and The Cleavage and The Hips and The Bare Back and The Come Hither Eyes.

1:04 is when it’s going to hurt.

(h/t also to Bill and Dan and Fender who called the video “a lap dance for your eyeballs.” HAH!)

3. An email from Emily at the City Paper re: their Best of Pittsburgh issue coming out next week:

Can’t tell you exactly what place yet, but you placed 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in our blog category.

Wow! Too bad I can’t go to the winner’s celebration at Diesel. Curse this anonymity. Of course it’s probably for the better, because if I don’t take first place, I might pull a Kathy Griffin and be all, “SUCK IT, PITTSBURGH!!”

If you voted for me, you’re really too kind. If I had known about it, I would have voted and instructed you to vote for Wendy Bell’s Blog (posthumously).

Carbolic Smoke Ball Blog should win it if just for this article alone.

4. Lose your glove? Here you go! Smart little chickie she is. And she’s getting international exposure for this idea. I’d like to own these gloves. Perfect for snowball-making. Also, have you ever seen a pigeon get hit by a snow ball? OMG AWESOME! They hate that shit. (h/t Barb)

5. According to this site, I’m a C-List blogger. Yeah, that sounds about right. (h/t Jordan)

6.  From the AP article entitled “Pittsburgh Has a New Attitude“:

PITTSBURGH – Note to Pittsburghers: Take what you think you know about the Steel City, wad it up into a little black-and-gold ball and throw it away.

That’s what the organizers of Pittsburgh’s 250th birthday celebration are hoping that people from here – and around the country – will do next year.

What the hell?  Yes, those of us that live here have no idea that our city is no longer a soot-filled cancerous hell hole.

God.

What a game!

Sitting out there in the cold, crappy rain, soaked to the skin and wearing a big smile on my face.

I’m totally lying.

Sit in that shit? Absolutely not. Especially not when I’ve got a brand new LCD TV above my fireplace beckoning with its warm pixels, my coffee pot beckoning me with its warm percolation and my couch beckoning me with it warm warminess.

Yes, PittGirl was staying in and suffering from Fantasy Football Dichotomy without worrying about getting killed. There were plenty of plays where I jumped up and down screaming for joy because the Steelers converted on a third down, and then I immediately realized how poorly that bode for my fantasy team, and then I was all, “Damn it!”

Onward:

1. Let’s start with Benny’s gorgeous rushing touchdown. (Yay!/Damn IT!!)

You know I love/hate that boy, but when he gets his Chewie on and decides to get a TD, it is a thing of beauty. Watch it again here. (h/t NY Luvs Pitts)

Evading a tackle, looking, looking, evading another tackle, looking, running and then just, SCREW THIS SHIT and away he goes with his bad self.

Love/hate scale is tipping a bit to the love side. However, the first quarter, with his high passes, his interception, and his whining about the rain and the ball and OMG IT IS ONLY RAINING ON MEEEEE!, I was kind of hating him.

Then he manned up and did his job and did it well. He also was able to do his job well because apparently the offensive line woke up from that two week nap they’ve been having. Faneca particularly was looking very sharp.

2. I was sad that I wasn’t on hand to witness Hines Ward break the franchise TD reception record, smiling the whole time he was doing it. But yeah, Al and John, I agree. Who ARE these people Hines says have been saying he couldn’t break the record? They’re not from around this confluence (ding!).

3. Carson Palmer and TJ Housh!? You are dead to me. DEAD! Your worthless asses are SO benched.

4. Al and Dan waited until the fourth quarter to drop confluence on us and then they were sure to do the obligatory “Pri-mahn-tees” shot. It was at this point that sister of PittGirl called me all, “Did you HEAR that? WTF?” (also h/t to Still A. Fan)

5. Willie Parker. Wow. Have we been spoiled by Jerome Bettis and his vice vise-like grip on the ball, or what?! I am not used to cringing every time the running back has the ball and boy, that last fumble? I saw that one coming way before he let go of it. Even Benny looked like he lost a little confidence in him.

Did you guys hear that guy call into DVE this morning saying, “Hey, so he had a bad day. Everyone has a bad day at the office occasionally.”

That’s because we won. Had we lost that guy would have called in and said, “May a flock of pigeons peck the eyeballs out of Willie Parker’s skull!”

It was nice to see Benny and Coach Tomlin trying to help him out though.

6. From a Cincinatti Enquirer article.

“Pittsburgh is home to nasty, horrible, classless fans – which makes an away win on their (field) even sweeter,” Sharonville resident Jason Diegmueller said in an e-mail. “I never had more F-bombs lobbed at me in a three-hour period as I did last year in Heinz Field, and I’ve never felt more threatened (physically) as when I’m in the men’s room there. Why do it again? Because there’s just something exciting about representing your team on the road. We wear our Bengals jerseys proudly, an out-of-place orange in a sea of yellow and black.”

Wah. Wah. Wah.

Steelers fans rock.

7. Finally, for months now readers have been emailing me about the frequency with which Mike Tomlin says “move forward” and wondering if I’m going to do something about it. Here’s the thing, in his last four press conferences alone, he has said “move forward” a total of 15 times.

Dudes. My goal is to give you an occasional guilt-free drink, NOT to pickle you.

I bet that’s a euphemism and I’m just not cool enough to know it.

(h/t Steve for the Calvin picture)

An email from David Johnson at WPXI:

Hey PittGirl – enjoy your blog.

Thought you’d like to know I saw David Conrad at my gym yesterday.

As George Costanza of Seinfeld would say, “I say this with a staunch, unblemished record of heterosexuality…” he looked pretty good.

You and my wife immediately came to mind, in that you both like his “work,” if you will.

Go Steelers and Go Gators (my alma mater).

David Johnson

So, does anyone know at what gym David Johnson works out?

So I can stalk David Johnson and ONLY David Johnson and no other David that might be sweatily flexing his muscles there.

Before we get to the Steelers on this fine, cold, windy, perfect Burgh morning, can we just take a minute here and talk about the pigeons?

Great.

1.  Reader Dwight sent me a link to this photo of what appears to be some pigeons taking up residence in an old air conditioning unit.  My first thought, I swear to God, was, “Does that mean if the AC turned on that the pigeons will be obliterated by the blades of a spinning fan?  And if so, AWESOME!”

2.   Reader Barb wrote:

I have an 11-month-old daughter, and we recently got some books out for her from the Mt. Lebo Library, and included was this one, which made me think of you. Looks like you need to come out with your own anti-pigeon board book line, to cultivate your minions among the baby and toddler set….

And I thought, “Wow.  Someone wrote a children’s book about pigeons?  I sure hope the title is, Why Satan made the pigeons and how to properly kill them without diseasing yourself.”

No.  No.  Some lunatic nutcase freak of nature went and wrote A WHOLE SERIES OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS ABOUT PIGEONS!

Not only is there (also available in Spanish!):

• The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog
• The Pigeon Loves Things That Go
• Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late
• Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus

There’s also:

Yes, kids.

The pigeon has feelings, too and those feelings are, “Come here you cute little kid and let me shit upon your hair.”

3.  And finally, reader and Facebook friend DW wrote about an occurrence at Mellon Park downtown:

I saw this happening outside after grabbing a latte and even interrupted my conversation with the following comment: “Oh my god, are they feeding PIGEONS?  PittGirl would have a coronary! OMFG that lady is letting them crawl all over her!!  Doesn’t she know they have diseases?! I have to document this and send it to PittGirl.  BRB.”

And the fun part about it is that when I approached those folks, I asked if they minded if I took some pictures, and all the damn pigeons flew away and the two standing against the wall feeding them said, “She spoke… they don’t recognize her voice.” And then they sighed heavily!  HEAVILY!  The nerve.

Brace yourselves for a serious case of the heebie jeebies and the “WTFies.”

It can’t be said enough — may God have mercy on their souls.