Philly Not Bad In Soot, Bad Everywhere Else

Time to pick on Pittsburgh, who the Flyers are playing in the Stanley Cup semifinals starting Friday. In another in a long line of meaningless rankings — this one rating “kinda meaningless” as opposed to “completely meaningless” — Pittsburgh has ranked #1 in the American Lung Association’s list of America’s Sootiest Cities.

Not that Philly is doing any better. Philly got a 6.3 from stateoftheair.org and had 19 “orange days.” Shit! 19 orange days! a six-point-three! And, look, Philly is #11 in ozone and 22nd in short-term partical pollution.

The State of the Air 2008 blog says it, uh, well:

When I found out that this year’s report card reveals that that one in 10 people in the U.S. live in areas with unhealthy levels of all three types of pollution: ozone, short-term and year-round particle pollution, I immediately went online to check the levels in my own state to see how this affected me and my family.

Me, too! Anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah, Pittsburgh. Those sootmongers!

Impending Tale Of Johnny Doc Doom

I feel bad for Brian Hickey, who left his job at Citypaper to work for Johnny Doc only to have Johnny Doc lose to a dude with the most annoying commercials ever. Ah, but such is politics, I suppose, and at least we have promises of an awesome blog post:

Coming later today, or maybe tomorrow, depending on how much work we have to do today to keep our fledgling organization to push John’s initiatives going strong, I’ll be offering a full breakdown on why the residents of the First District made out worse on Tuesday than either John or Anne Dicker; complete with a breakdown of how the city’s established media used a disgusting, all-out smear campaign to keep a good man down.

The bolding is his; God, that is pretty much the best sentence ever. I am so excited for this blog post and the detailing of the established media’s smear campaign to help Vince Fumo defeat Johnny Doc. Or something.

The Second Day After [Philly Blunt]

And Now A Full Post On The Byko Column

Stu Bykofsky went to that 10,000 men rally yesterday at the Liacouras Center, and the resulting column was pretty much what you’d expect from an old white man attending a rally of 10,000 black people: Complete and total awesomeness.

He first notes the rally lost about a third of the crowd around the time the Eagles game started. (It went from 2:40 to 5.) But the opening graf is pretty awesome, too:

THE USE of the Liacouras Center at Temple University, a seat of learning, was unintended symbolism for yesterday’s “10,000 Men: A Call to Action,” the black mobilization to take back the city’s toughest neighborhoods from killers, drug dealers, hustlers and pimps.

Pimps! Now there’s a job you don’t really see reported on in the news much. “Pimp kills 2,” perhaps the headlines would read. Hustlers, too; I kind of thought hustlers would encompass drug dealers and pimps, but maybe not. Maybe Byko lost a lot of money to a pool hustler and doesn’t want that to happen to somebody else.

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