Best Catalog of Changing Landscapes

In an oddly specific category, this very blog has been named the unanimous winner of the prestigious "Best Catalog of Changing Landscapes" award, as decided by President Obama, the joint chiefs of staff, and the editorial board of Pittsburgh Magazine.

What this means, besides, of course, a smaller font on my resume to keep my most notable accolades under the recommended 14 page maximum, is that if you pick up the print version of Pittsburgh Magazine this month and do that little thing where you lick your finger to turn the page like 78 or so times, you will find this:

For reference, here is the entire page:

I know what you are thinking, which is that next year I should start a mobile fashion truck in an effort to get a giant photo into the magazine. Broke Little Rich Girl, I am coming after you!

But, full page photo or not, I am very pleased to have won this award and I am very thankful to live in a time when a blog can literally change the world into a dramatically better place which is a lot like the world that existed before the blog except with a handful of friends and family having something to talk about whenever I see them at social gatherings.

To see a list of all of the "Best of the Burgh 2014" winners, click here or pick up a print version for yourself (two, if you want to frame one).

The Beagle Brothers in Pittsburgh, PA Used to Be a Pizza Hut

What kind of blog doesn't have a theme song? A shitty one, that's what kind. Well, this ain't no shitty blog no more, because our good friends (and half decent people) the Beagle Brothers, based right here out of lovely Pittsburgh, PA (where UTBAPH is headquartered) have gone ahead and recorded a masterpiece that I would liken to Mr. Holland's Opus if Mr. Holland was completely awesome instead of being a big dumb boring sack of dust who hated his deaf son and his opus was an awesome song about a blog that went viral when the users of the internet apparently ran out of real things to look at online (90s movie references and run-on sentences are limited from this point forward in this post, I assure you).

So here, without much further ado, is the first of two versions. Note the cowbell.



And then, my personal favorite, featuring the Ladies Man, is the alternate version:



Since, apparently, the readers of UTBAPH know what to do to take things viral, I assume that these will both have (deservedly) a few million hits by tomorrow morning. And go check out the Beagle Brothers on Facebook and Twitter.

And, despite the post title, I should explain that the Beagle Brothers did not, in fact, used to be a Pizza Hut.

I think they were a Shoney's all-you-can-eat buffet.

99% Invisible

If you don't already listen to the 99% Invisible podcast, then prepare to spend the next month or so catching up on old episodes (as I did towards the end of last year). Ostensibly, it is a podcast about design and architecture, but, in practice, it is a podcast about everything. The producers of 99% Invisible could argue, and rightly so, that it is a podcast about everything because design plays a role in almost every aspect of our lives, but that is only part of it. What I think is that, in an attempt to create a podcast about the interesting elements of design, they came to realize that there is almost nothing around us that isn't interesting if you dig in closely enough to the details.

As an example, a certain blog that I happen to curate (and that you, in turn, happen to consume) was the topic of the latest installment of 99% Invisible. Now, I put this blog, in terms of educational value/cultural awareness/architectural enlightenment somewhere in between a dick joke and a fart joke. It is, lest we kid ourselves, not much more than photos of old Pizza Huts.

But the good people at 99% Invisible (namely, Sam Greenspan and Roman Mars), who put this episode together, bothered themselves with the details of former Pizza Huts in a way that yours truly had not considered to do. The history of the buildings, the socio-economic reasons for their rise and fall, the official stance of Pizza Hut's corporate offices on this phenomenon -- these are all the kinds of things that they found interesting about this topic. And they were kind enough to share their findings -- with those of us who are still laughing over the word "fart" -- for our own enlightenment.

I had the pleasure of working with local producer Margaret Krauss on this piece, who, herself, is all kinds of interesting and talented.

Please check out episode 103 of 99% Invisible. Give Sam and Roman a follow on Twitter, and Like their page on Facebook. Maybe even buy a "Read the Plaque" shirt from their site (you will need to listen to a few episodes to get that reference).

Then, after you done got your learn on, come back here and laugh at silly pictures of abandoned buildings.

And if you came to this site via 99% Invisible, welcome.

Yours in childish humor being turned into something educational by much smarter people,

-Mike