Playing skyline Scrabble in Pittsburgh

I gaze upon the spectacular skyline of Pittsburgh and think of board games. Not Monopoly, as you might expect or other pastimes involving skyscrapers and property values.

Nope. I think of Scrabble.

I think how can I take all these massive letters littering the view and string together some words to express my contempt.

Travel experts routinely include Pittsburgh among the list of the most beautiful cities in the world. It also does well in literacy rankings.

It ought to. You can’t stare at the photogenic city without being forced to read the names of all the corporations intent on making their names even more ubiquitous.

There’s UPMC, BNY MELLON, HIGHMARK, K&L GATES, CITIZENS BANK, FEDERATED and on and on and on.

Of course, it’s mostly done in that ANNOYING ALL CAPS style that never fails to tick off us connoisseurs of subtlety.

Where did it all begin?

Blame PNC Park (more evidence of disgraceful corporate naming shenanigans).

It’s the jewel-like ballpark along the north shore banks of the Allegheny River and home to the Pittsburgh Pirates -- and let’s save picking on them and whipping boy owner Bob Nutting for another day.

When the park opened in 2000, architectural critics immediately hailed it as the most beautiful in America. Magazines featured lavish hitter’s eye view pictures from home plate.

It dazzles still. There’s the diamond, the lush outfield, and soaring in the background across the river the mingled mix of old and new, brick and glass, rustic and refined that combine to make the city’s dynamic skyline.

The park is magnificent enough to be a popular site for elegant weddings. I attended one of them -- best of everything always to Howard and Mary! -- and I couldn’t have had a more splendid time.

The food was sumptuous and the appointments exquisite. And as for the view from the club level lounges, well, Will and Kate should have had it so good.

In 10 years, the vista has become the second most photographed spot in Pittsburgh, second only to the sublime shot of the city from atop Mt. Washington.

But whenever you point a camera at anything in America today there’s always bound to be a marketing guru ready to spring into the viewfinder intent on waving the name of some insurance company to spoil the scenery.

That’s what happened in Pittsburgh. Because of baseball and its designation to host often high-profile events like the G-20 in 2009, the city is frequently featured in the national news.

That’s good. I want people everywhere to know why I love Pittsburgh.

But in an age that exaggerates the importance of name recognition over accomplishment -- think Charlie Sheen or Donald Trump -- corporate overlords sensed opportunity.

They instigated a rash of placing their neon names atop once majestic skyscrapers Pittsburghers already instinctively knew.

It’d be like if our neighbors got BOB and SUE tattooed on their foreheads to remind us of their existence.

And where do they get all these giant letters?

Is there a big letter store somewhere you call and place an order?

“Yeah, I need an M, an E, two Ls, an O and an N sent over to Grant Street. What’s that? You’re running a special on Qs? I know a VP over at COMQUEST. Let me see if he’ll go in with me. OK?”

I imagine delivery of all these letters coming down the interstate on the back of a trailer would look like some PBS learn-to-read special or maybe a page from the colorful children’s book, “CHICK-A-CHICK-A BOOM! BOOM!”

I’m always tempted to tinker with the sign lettering down at the local elementary school so instead of a cheerfully educational slogan about reading it'll say something like, “WE ROAST CHILDREN HERE!”

But the obnoxious corporate branding of the city I love has me thinking of something more monumental.

I’m going to get a helicopter and surreptitiously maneuver it around the city until I can fix some of the massive letters together in a sign that reads: “THIS LOOKS REALLY CHEESY!”

I’ll just have to be careful I don’t inadvertently contribute to the problem by stringing the letters up atop a building that houses Kraft Foods.

Back when meltdowns were quaint

It hasn’t even been a week and I’m already nostalgic for days when sobering meltdowns had less to do with damaged core reactors and more to do with Charlie Sheen.

In fact, few words in history have changed their meanings as dramatically as meltdown, a term that has its actual roots in ice cream consumption.

This from the March 1937 edition of Ice Cream Trade Journal: “The (featured) ice cream melts down cleanly in the mouth. Due to the clean meltdown, a cooler sensation results in the mouth than with gelatin ice cream.”

Yes, I’m one of those nutty ice cream trade journal collectors.

Actually, that’s the first citation of the term’s usage from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Until this week, it hadn’t dawned on me just how popular the term meltdown had become. Meltdowns have been reliably splendid entertainment -- as long as it’s not happening to us.

Our celebrities meltdown. So do our 4 year olds. And, gadzooks, so do the nuclear power plants we construct on earthquake-prone tectonic plate shelves.

I don’t doubt every precaution was taken, but can’t help but think in 50 years history-savvy comics will refer to the incident and punchline it with some variation of “What the hell were they thinking?” That is assuming earth lasts another 50 years.

The energies we can’t live without are all killing us.

I see pictures of devastated Japanese clutching smart phones and wonder where they get the energy. Certainly, the charge has by now died right along with tens of thousands of their godforsaken countrymen and women.

Maybe holding the phone gives them some Teddy Bear kind of comfort.

I wonder if you could go back 25 years and say, “Okay, you can have all the cheap power you want, but at some point that power source will fail and contaminate you and your land for the next century. Your choice: cheap, deadly energy or reduced energy availability that’s going to cost you a fortune.”

Guaranteed, we all take the pig-out option.

It’s happening here throughout Pennsylvania where Marcellus Shale drilling is making instant millionaires out of struggling farmers and, it seems, everyone else (except, of course, land-poor bloggers like me).

But extracting techniques couldn’t be more loathsome. Roads sufficient to bear heavy machinery are constructed deep into the woods like the ones in which I live. The big diggers are hauled in and loud, unmanned drilling operations begin to raise  their ruckus.

The drills go thousands of feet beneath the surface to release tiny bubbles of natural gas through a repulsive practice known as “fracking,” firing a toxic brew of chemicals, water and sand into the wells to crack the shale and release the gas.

Of course, we’ve all been assured it’s perfectly safe by the executives who stand to lose millions the instant any of it’s revealed to be anything other than perfectly safe.

To me it sounds like the recipe for an ecological catastrophe that that will one day have our mutant descendants asking “What the hell were they thinking?”

It would be less galling if there was some sense of responsible oversight and if I could see some public good in the way of revenues flowing within all those streams of poisoned water in places where my grandfather used to fish and my children frolic.

But newly elected governor Tom Corbett has vowed he wouldn’t tax the companies being enriched by the drilling. Pennsylvania, the state with the most abundant drilling opportunities, is alone in not taxing the drillers. Corbett’s new budget includes massive layoffs and the end to services many of our neediest residents rely on to function.

And what again makes me most furious is my long-ago vow that I’d keep this blog relatively profanity free.

Geez, I’d love to carpet f-bomb the crap out of Corbett, who seems like an otherwise decent gent, but is either a dunce or a crook on this pivotal issue.

So I look out my back porch and instead of serenity I feel impending doom. I tune into CNN and see a more urgent manifestation of a doom we all dread.

It makes me long for bygone days when I could enjoy a nice Mint Chocolate Chip meltdown in my mouth while watching the latest celebrity meltdown being played out like it was something really significant.

Simpler, less complicated times.

Like last Friday.

Aged Oscar thoughts & recent tweets

It’s been two nights and I’m still startled awake by nightmares that 94-year-old Kirk Douglas is in my room trying to present me an award for best supporting blogger.

That was the Oscars that was supposed to appeal to a youthful audience?

Producers must assume everyone born after 1980 are morons who can be pandered to by pretty young hosts who chirp “Twitter!” “FaceBook!” and “App!” every seven minutes.

I don’t know why we expect so much from an Oscar telecast when the only industry more historically disappointing than the movie industry is the one that makes ugly gas guzzlers in Detroit.

I have a lot to say about the issues raised by the Oscars, in particular, the age issue. I’m itching to talk about it because for the next few months I’m perfectly middle-aged.

I just turned 48 and my late grandfather lived to be 97. By that narrow calculus, I’m right at the peak of middle-agedness, so I’m perfectly neutral in regards to bashing both the too young and the too old. I need to seize the opportunity while it remains ripe.

But, of course, I can’t do all that now, not while I’m trying to keep up with every Charlie Sheen interview. So here’s another hybrid blog/twitter post -- and shouldn’t use of those two words get me trending with 20-somethings?

For those keeping score, I haven’t done one of these lazy hybrids since December 16. And I don’t know why I feel the need to defend laziness, something I often celebrate here and whenever I succumb to its sedentary temptations.

• Truly, Kirk Douglas’s appearance was scarier than some of theatrical entries in the the special effects categories. Having him present might have worked if they’d have put him in some context to show the kiddies what a great actor and dashing gent he once was. But having him out there in his condition was a mistake. It looks like he underwent some sort of nonagenarian plastic surgery, which ought to dissuade other nonagenarians from seeking the procedure.

• A nonagenarian is a person between 90 and 100 years old. I had to look it up.

• James Franco was a bore, but Anne Hathaway did nothing to diminish my love for her. In fact, if I were producing the Oscars next year, I’d rehire her and tell her to spend the entire three hours looking soulfully into the camera while the winners were announced on the crawl below her angelic face. 

• Part of me is hoping Charlie Sheen can truly heal himself. Addiction is a very serious problem and Sheen seems to have most of the ones I’d have if I were him. But treating addiction has become too big an industry that seems to encourage addiction.

• I’d rather hear what Keith Richards has to say on Charlie Sheen’s addiction than Dr. Drew.

• Interested in seeing my recent msnbc.com story on great city slogans and why they work? Check it out right here. 

• Know of any good blogs or want to recommend your own? Please forward the address and I’ll post here with the others. Don’t be shy. Only rule is you need to post at least once a week or it ain’t really blogging.

Here’s a handful of recent tweets  . . .

• How come Col. Muammar Khadafi has been Libya's absolute ruler for 41 years and has never been promoted? Maybe he's a humble tyrant.

• Just learned the people of Yuma, AZ, refer to themselves as Yumans. I plan to enter a 5K there so I can say I've joined the Yuman Race.

• My most irrational fear of aging is that one day people younger than me will have children older than me.

• Can anyone as habitually truant as I was ever be considered truly "old school?"

• The word for lies that resist fact and endure for mythological lengths ought to be "durabull." For example: "Fox provides durabull news."

• The next step in smart phone evolution is to include hardware like blades, scissors, etc. Yes, it's time for the Swiss Army Knife Phone.

• He was a great man, but does JP II really deserve sainthood? What'd he do besides act really popey?

• How come bread sticks don't grow on bread trees?

• Just met a man who on this chilly morning was wearing a musical bellows. He was dressed accordioningly.

Gotta run. I haven’t checked in an hour, but I think Charlie Sheen’s about to be interviewed again. Just for fun, I think I’m going to tune into the Cooking Network and watch until he appears. Shouldn’t be too long.