First the couches and then what?

When Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl signs an ordinance banning from unenclosed porches anything made of stuffed cloth, potatoes all over Oakland will have to drag their mildewing sofas and mattresses back into the house or otherwise dispose of them.

(I'd suggest heaving them into the driveway and dousing them with lighter fluid, but apparently this is what got the al fresco upholstery fans in trouble in the first place.)

(Wait, I just thought of another option. You can do what everyone does with couches and armchairs of a certain age and hideousness: Give them to Goodwill, thus ensuring they end up on someone else's porch.)

In the suburbs, where I live, we don't tend to put sofas on our porches because we are too busy cramming them with whimsical seasonal decorations like inflatable pink Easter Bunnies and wooden signs that say "The Johnson's," which always makes me wonder "The Johnson's what?"

My relatives in West Virginia don't have a porch, so they have to make do with a deer carcass hanging in the garage (in season) and a trash barrel next to the patio.

The house I grew up in had a deck, and we might have sat on it more often if it had had a sofa on it. But it never occurred to us to put one out there, quite possibly because we instinctively feared a scenario described to me by a Penn State grad recalling his college days: He and his buddies went out to move the porch couch, and as soon as they touched it, it erupted in a deafening buzz.

Turned out it had a hornets nest in it the size of a microwave oven.

Again, I can think of a quick and epic solution to that, but I am the first to admit that I may be too quick to default to the flamethrower option. Plus you'd still need someone expendable, anesthetized with a gallon or two of grain punch, to pull it off the porch. Safety first.

That was not an isolated incident, judging by the disparaging comment of an Oakland community organizer, who came out against the beloved porch couch because "it draws pests and rodents and bugs." Is there any aspect of undergraduate life that doesn't draw pests and rodents and bugs? I nearly failed a class in college because I used the hardcover textbooks to smash centipedes and was too scared to pick the books up off the floor afterward.

Pittsburgh is not the first college town to conclude that mattresses or elderly sofas on public display imbue a neighborhood with a certain redneck je ne sais quoi. And it's undeniable that cloth, cotton batting, wooden porches, inebriation, slumber and cigarettes are not the happiest of combinations. Throw in a school or city sports championship, and who can resist the warm and cheerful glow of a sacrificial settee or hunk-a hunk-a burning loveseat?

This legislation leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

If students can't burn couches, will they upgrade to torching cars? Or just transfer to WVU?

What about rattan?

Are plastic slipcovers flame retardant, or just hilarious?

My God, are porch washing machines next?

Councilwoman Tonya Payne told the Post-Gazette she saw a porch furnished with a toilet, chest of drawers and two nightstands. That's already more furniture than I had in my first apartment, and I bet the toilet was being used as a planter.

There is a legitimate lifestyle issue here, and the porch-sofa devotees rightly lament the loss of a comfortable place to curl up or hang out on a warm evening when the closest thing you have to air conditioning is an electric fan and a washcloth you keep in the freezer. What can they legally lounge on?

I have a uniquely Pittsburgh solution. Two words:

Parking chairs.