Pittsburgh has garnered a lot of honors and made a lot of high-profile lists this year: Most Livable, Most Walkable, a Top Place to Live, Best Place to Blow Glass, Replacement Window Mecca, Best Place to See Art You Don't Understand, City of the Future Obsessed with the Past, Hot City to Start a Business In (Please???), Most Dinosaurs, Ballpark With Best View of Losing Team, Most Geek-Friendly and Best Place To Be Old and Married.

Kind of makes you want to sweep up a few cigarette butts, doesn't it?

This week, the city was named by Frommer's -- the folks whose guide you may have used as a pillow in European train stations -- as one of its Top Destinations for 2008. Actually, Western Pennsylvania made the list twice, both as Pittsburgh and as a part of the American Whiskey Trail, which includes Woodville Plantation in Collier, the West Overton Museum in Scottdale and the Oliver Miller Homestead in South Park. None of which is a distillery, so BYOW.

The Frommer's list is not a Most Popular list, or even a Best list; it's more of a Here's an Interesting Place You May Not Have Gotten To Yet list. And part of what Frommer's thought was interesting about Pittsburgh in 2008 is that next year, the city turns 250, making it just slightly older than its average residents.

This 250th anniversary, or squishimondocentennial, could potentially fill the daily arriving flight at Pittsburgh International with eager tourists. After checking into their hotels and discovering that "convenient to Downtown" actually means "somewhere in Coraopolis," they will be looking for things to see and do.

Any proud Pittsburgher would be happy to direct them to Heinz Field or the nearest Primanti's. But here are some other tourism ideas:

• A driving tour of paper streets. You'll feel like Steve McQueen as you bounce down an unexpected flight of stairs in your rental car.

• Big summer concert tours. If the Bay City Rollers cancel, there's always Rupert Holmes or the Captain and Tennille. Pass the pina coladas and get ready for some muskrat love!

• Pittsburgh's fine universities. There are several, boasting interesting architecture, diverse theatrical productions, art galleries and lecture series. To see them, rent a bicycle. They have parking for bicycles.

• Explore the neighborhoods. This town has more ethnic neighborhoods than Epcot! Italian, Polish, Jewish, Irish, Greek, Korean, Ukrainian ... Just don't let anyone hear you speaking Spanish. They'll think you're coming to hijack El Fantasma de Acero.

• Get to know some bridges. Three rivers flow through Pittsburgh: The Allegheny, the Ohio and the Parkway East Bathtub. The only city in the world with more bridges is Venice, and many of the beautiful spans have an interesting story or unique design. Trying to drive across all of the Downtown bridges could be a bit of a challenge, because the quirky street grid often makes it hard to find a way up onto a bridge that you can plainly see. If you become discouraged, rather than ask a local person what's on the other side of a river, it is best to consult a map.

• A day (or two!) at the museums. Native son Andy Warhol has his own museum, even though he moved to New York, stopped combing his hair and painted soup cans. Oddly, some of the dinosaurs whose skeletons are preserved at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History did the same thing, except for the soup cans.

• Visitors to Pittsburgh really ought to make time for an architectural tour of its churches. There are awe-inspiring houses of worship in every part of the city, from St. Stan's in the Strip, to First Presbyterian and Trinity Downtown, the temples in the East End, St. Paul's Cathedral in Oakland, to the soaring, modern one that sits on the North Shore. Boy, does that fill up on Sundays! Mostly near the holidays, though -- lots of empty seats in the summer.

We can hope that being on Frommer's list will drum up some extra tourism dollars next year -- maybe even enough to erase our economic woes, especially if our visitors can be persuaded to enjoy a lot of poured drinks and rental cars.

Really, there's not much serious competition on that list. Most people aren't going to run off to Micronesia. And even in bad weather, Pittsburgh still beats this one, which I am not making up: Exit Zero on the Garden State Parkway, New Jersey.

Though that's probably not under construction.