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Pity the poor people of Harrison. Who among us knows they exist?
But then who can name all 130 municipalities in Allegheny County? Nobody. Not even the guy who created the name-that-municipality game.
I came across this online game on PG+ the other day. The idea is to name "all 129" of the county's political divisions in 12 minutes. (The game's creator forgot to include Collier, an omission he hopes to correct before too many of the township's 5,000-plus residents come looking for him.)
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About 70 people have played the game since it went online a week ago. More than half couldn't even name 40 municipalities.
Could you?
There are various strategies. You can go alphabetically.
Aleppo, Aspinwall, Blawnox, Brackenridge, Collier, Crescent, Dormont, Emsworth, Edgeworth, and so on.
I tried that and knew I was missing plenty. So I tried naming the big ones: Pittsburgh, Penn Hills, Wilkinsburg, Monroeville, Ross, Shaler, McCandless.
Still there were gaps, so I started geographically. Where have I been lost in the North Hills? The South Hills? The Mon Valley? The list fills as you type in names, with answers ranked by population, but my tally still had more holes than the state budget and Mark McGwire's steroid explanation combined.
I decided I needed music. Oddly, I flashed on Julie Andrews and those little dancing Austrians singing "My Favorite Things":
Pittsburgh's the largest and Haysville the leastest
Findlay is westest and Plum is our eastest
Rhyming communities this way is dumb
But none in this county could name every one
Brackenridge, Pine and the Castle that's Shannon
Emsworth is next on the road from Ben Avon
Robinson gets to have Moon on its wing
And who was the schnook who paired Wilmer with Ding?
Girls in McDonald might date boys in Oakdale
But they get lost on their way home from Millvale
Pleasant Hills, Braddock Hills, Sewickley Heights
Trying to name them all keeps me up nights.
Where is Wall at?
What's a Port Vue?
Whither township Fawn?
I simply remember municipal names.
And then I stay up past dawn.
OK, enough already.
The game's creator goes by the nom de cyberspace "Pazzle" but his real name is Alex Pazuchanics. He's seeking a bachelor's degree in metropolitan and regional management at George Washington University and his Web site, "Politics and Place," pitches "field notes on the New Urban condition ...Hello Cleveburgh!"
When I e-mailed, Mr. Pazuchanics responded that he was inspired to create the game after reading my book, "The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century."
There I mentioned that of Pennsylvania's 2,566 municipalities, four of every five have fewer than 5,000 residents.
Amoebas split less often.
Mr. Pazuchanics, 20, grew up in Baldwin Borough, moved to Whitehall and attended Central Catholic in Oakland. His grandparents are from Port Vue and Glassport. He knows communities of every size.
Yet when he put the game together (with data supplied by Chris Briem of "Null Space") he was able to name only 103 communities moments after creating the game.
The 93 I named in my third try was the most so far, he said.
Communities of the upper Allegheny Valley have been conspicuous in their omission. Only one person has named Frazer, and that may have been me after missing the first time and seeing my errors. Others to the northeast -- Springdale, Harrison, Fawn, Brackenridge, Harmar (misspelled on the game board) -- have been named by fewer than 5 percent of gamesters.
Maybe we should be pleased with how much we do know, considering half the county's municipalities have fewer than 5,000 residents. We have more police chiefs than does Montana. We have at least 16 communities with fewer than 1,000 residents.
I managed to name 12 of those 16, and I'm hoping each resident of Sewickley Heights, Pennsbury Village, Wall, Kilbuck, Sewickley Hills, Osborne, Thornburg, Ben Avon Heights, South Versailles, Glenfield, Haysville and Trafford will thank me. Sure, that's asking a lot, but it shouldn't take long.
