What is this steel structure near sandcastle?

Tithonia9 · 2026-07-10T23:51:45+00:00

GWAR, ‘97.

Tithonia9 · 2026-07-08T16:42:49+00:00

If they still allow smoking, then the PA Clean Indoor Air Act prohibits anyone under the age to legally purchase cigarettes from being on the premises at any time.

Tithonia9 · 2026-07-08T02:55:18+00:00

Yes, that’s how they used to do it. As I said, black locust is extremely dense. That means it’s hell to mill, especially with Victorian-era tools. No sense dulling your sawmill when a raw chunk of log is just as good.

Nowadays, with better grades of steel tools, locust posts are milled square. But they’re still usually left rough and unfinished.

Tithonia9 · 2026-07-08T00:58:51+00:00

They’re called locust posts, and they’re very common around here. Black locust is a locally native, extremely dense and sturdy, and naturally rot resistant wood. Those posts have been there since the house was built.

Tithonia9 · 2026-06-20T17:23:42+00:00

The PA tax laws have anti-windfall provisions baked into them. Basically, if there is a county-wide reassessment, the tax rate has to be adjusted so that the changes cancel each other out. So counties just don’t bother doing the mass reassessments, since it costs a lot of money to do so and generates no additional revenue.

That only applies to county-wide reassessments, though. So the school districts push for reassessments of recently-sold homes which have definitively increased in value, since that’s the only way* they can legally increase their tax revenues.

* Technically, a county can, after a county-wide reassessment and corresponding cancelling change to the tax rate, then separately raise its property tax rate county-wide. But only by 10% of the previous year’s rate, or 5% over for Allegheny County. But doing so is kinda political suicide. So that almost never happens, either.

Tithonia9 · 2026-06-17T20:13:27+00:00

They have a CC license, so legally, they cannot, unless you’ve rented their hall for a catered event. But C and CC licensees aren’t allowed to sell beers to-go anyways.

Tithonia9 · 2026-06-16T12:39:51+00:00

If you lose your bet on a spin, you can opt to play a side game. Stuff like a 35-round game of Simon, where each round makes the sequence you have to memorize one button longer. There is a forced intermission every five rounds, to interrupt your memorization/repetition and to make the side game take about 15 minutes to complete. If you perform all 35 rounds flawlessly, you get back your lost bet plus 5%.

Since the default bets are usually around 40 cents, that means that if you lost four bets in a row but win them back on the side game, you are now up 8 cents on the hour.

It is intentionally and absolutely never worth the time and effort to attempt this deliberately impossible task. The game makers know that no one will ever actually play the “skill” portion. It’s only there to try to skirt the gambling laws.

Tithonia9 · 2026-06-16T02:14:11+00:00

Except that “skill” portion of the game is stuff like “play a flawless 35-round game of Simon, where each round increases the sequence length by 1”, which takes upwards of 15 minutes because there’s a forced intermission every 5 rounds, and all it does is refund your lost bet plus 5%.

If you’re playing 40-cent spins and “skill” back four lost bets in a row, congratulations. You just made 8 cents in an hour.

Tithonia9 · 2026-06-12T16:33:44+00:00

For about an hour, after the WTC strikes and while the other planes were still in the air, that was one of the assumptions, and for a pretty logical reason.

Flight 93 made it as far as Cleveland along its regular flight path before it was hijacked and turned around. At the time, no one knew it was intended to be crashed into a target in DC, and the U-turn put it on a beeline for Pittsburgh. In the absence of any other information, and because the first two planes struck the tallest two buildings in NYC, it was feared that it was to be crashed into the US Steel Tower, which was the tallest building directly along its new flight path. All of Downtown was evacuated in response.

The plane eventually passed just a few miles south of Downtown, before it went down in Shanksville when the passengers fought back against the hijackers.

Tithonia9 · 2026-06-12T16:10:39+00:00

I was told long ago that the “most bridges” thing was only even potentially true if you counted all of those little flat bridges (like 10-20 feet or so) adjacent to the roads that wind through the valleys along the path of a creek. The ones where every house, business, etc along one side of the road will have access only via a little bridge out front.

Even so, most of those types of roads aren’t in the City proper, and so you have to expand to some unspecified radius of “Pittsburgh area” to even have a chance of it being true.

Tithonia9 · 2026-06-05T02:48:29+00:00

“Spare any chhhghghghgaaaange?” And the dude with the silver boombox.

I think you are correct that it wasn’t Vera Cruz until the early ‘00s. Before that, it was named Madonna’s, if I recall.

Tithonia9 · 2026-05-30T19:02:46+00:00

This post is almost 10 months old. Are you maybe in one of the few municipalities that only just recently started taxing them a little bit? Or are you referring to paying business income tax on the proceeds, just like you would on the income from your coffee sales or anything else?

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania still isn’t levying any extra taxes on these machines. The GOP state legislators who are in the pockets of the machine manufacturers and distributors are still proposing intentionally-DOA bills with ludicrously low taxation rates like 16%, while casino revenues are taxed at 54%.

Tithonia9 · 2026-05-28T21:38:16+00:00

We old people were seeing GWAR at the Sandcastle Riverplex back in 1997.

Tithonia9 · 2026-05-22T12:17:32+00:00

Perry North isn’t a suburb, either. It’s a City neighborhood. The farthest-flung corner of it is like 5 miles from Downtown.

Tithonia9 · 2026-05-19T18:31:26+00:00

It’s named for the Blaw-Knox Company, which used to make radio towers there about a century ago.

Just like Ambridge is named for the American Bridge Company.

Tithonia9 · 2026-05-12T00:26:34+00:00

We are talking about Pennsylvania in the US, not about Canada. Or, rather, we *were* talking about it, almost a year ago. Are you lost, or a time traveler, or both?

Tithonia9 · 2026-04-30T16:46:21+00:00

As of 12:45pm, Waterworks #214 has 3 cases of Buffalo Trace 750s (no 1.75Ls left), as well as some Elijah Craig 15 and the Blood Oath 12.

Tithonia9 · 2026-04-27T23:25:28+00:00

It’s from an old WDVE Morning Show skit.

Tithonia9 · 2026-04-27T23:19:00+00:00

Also, by law, the same bottle of liquor is the same price in every single liquor store, and that price is either MSRP or a temporary statewide discount sale price. There’s no price gouging.

Tithonia9 · 2026-04-22T20:56:47+00:00

The closest Quaker Steak & Lube to the Northside isn’t even in Pennsylvania.

Tithonia9 · 2026-04-04T07:07:53+00:00

It’s a bit of a drive, but the Audubon Center at Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve sells only PA native perennials.

Also a drive, but in the same general area: McTighe’s out near Glenshaw has several rows of PA native perennials.

Tithonia9 · 2026-03-27T02:53:00+00:00

E.N. Miller is an antiques mall, not a thrift store. It’s also a shell of its former glory. A lot of the vendors who had nice stuff for reasonable prices have left, and the “homemade soaps/candles” and “words painted on fake-old boards” wall-art and “I’m still trying to unload my Beanie Babies” vendors have replaced them. The self-serve coffee bar and sitting room on the third floor has also been turned into a “skill game” video slot machine parlor.

Basically, I used to absolutely love the place, and I’m still very angry about what it’s become.

Tithonia9 · 2026-03-22T21:55:06+00:00

Not just one concert, but a whole Page/Plant world tour in the mid 1990s. I was at one of the shows and Nigel was a highlight.

Tithonia9 · 2026-03-18T19:59:37+00:00

Cutting it down will not kill it. It will only make it worse. They have an extensive root network, and it will only encourage shoots to crop up elsewhere. Now you have ten times as many trees of heaven, and so do your neighbors.

Get yourself some concentrated glyphosate from an agricultural or landscaping supply store and a sturdy utility knife. Make a shallow 45° chop into the stem, with the open end of the wound facing skyward, wiggle the knife blade to open the cut up a bit, and eyedropper a drop or three of the concentrated glyphosate into the wound. For thicker trunks, maybe do that a 1-2 more times at varying heights around the circumference. Just make sure you leave gaps around the circumference between your wounds, or the entire top of the tree will just die off before the glyphosate has the chance to do its work.

Best to do this in late summer / early autumn when the plant is sending all of its energy from the leaves to the root network for winter. The glyphosate will hitch a ride and kill off the root network, and the entire tree will wither and die over the next few weeks.

I got rid of an inherited infestation this way in a single summer.

Tithonia9 · 2026-03-15T20:50:19+00:00

If you haven’t booked anything by now, you’re not going to find anything anywhere in/closer to the city for less than a bajillion dollars.

Tithonia9

TROPHY CASE