Laurels & lances: Eating, excellence, elections

Laurel: To a tasteful event. Restaurants have had a rough year. Those that have survived the last 11 months have done so with tenacity and hard work that has to be commended.

And that makes this year’s Greensburg Restaurant Week probably the most important ever.

Nineteen different eateries are participating in the Greensburg Community Development Corporation’s semiannual celebration of local food, and for the first time, it won’t just be about dinner. Breakfast and lunch are on the table too. The pandemic capacity restrictions have also made it hard to fill seats so takeout and delivery options are covered as well with the $35 or less price tags.

If there is a way to support local business, why not do it deliciously?

Laurel: To celebrating our best. Before leaving office, President Donald Trump issued one more executive order that added 200 people to be honored with statues in the National Garden of American Heroes. A number of those people lived or worked in Western Pennsylvania.

They included athletes like Pittsburgh Pirates legend Roberto Clemento and “Miracle on Ice” coach Herb Brooks, who might have been born in Minnesota but ended his hockey career as the Penguins’ director of player personnel. There was Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist who built both the steel industry and the idea of accessible neighborhood libraries. There was film icon Jimmy Stewart and there was polio vaccine creator Jonas Salk. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, a brilliant military leader in WWII and the Korean War, came to Pittsburgh in 1955 to chair the Mellon Institute and lived here until his death in 1993.

“Astounding the world by the sheer power of their example, each one of them has contributed indispensably to America’s noble history, the best chapters of which are still to come,” Trump said.

Lance: To not giving anybody a break. The last four years have been wave upon wave of election insanity as we pinballed from the 2016 presidential elections to the Trump inauguration to the Pennsylvania municipal and county races of 2017 and then the congressional midterms of 2018, which also happened to be a particularly nasty Keystone State gubernatorial year.

There were more county and local races in 2019, but who could even tell because that was when the 2020 presidential primary process was already in full swing with wave after wave of debates. Then there was the 2020 election year itself, which we have only narrowly concluded. If it was a race, we aren’t even in the locker room getting changed. We are still barely past the finish line, collapsed on the ground and breathing hard.

So it is utterly exhausting that so many people are already jumping forward to let it be known they are running for something again.

Lt. Gov. John Fetterman has announced he’s considering a second run for the U.S. Senate seat that will be vacated by the retiring Sen. Pat Toomey in 2022. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto officially tossed his hat in for a third term, and is already facing a primary challenge from state Rep. Ed Gainey, who announced this week. (Retired police officer Tony Moreno said in September 2019 that he would run against Peduto in the May 2021 primary, but has not commented recently.)

OK, yes, the countdown of all the filing and nominating dates for the May primary does kick off in February, so there isn’t a lot of time to waste. That’s true.

But haven’t we all earned just one week where nobody is running for anything? Apparently not.