Banana fight in Pa. gas station leads to charges for employee
Published: Mar. 27, 2024, 10:02 a.m.
By Chris Mautner | cmautner@pennlive.com
A fight that began with bananas being thrown inside a Pittsburgh gas station has led to one person hospitalized and a clerk facing charges.
The incident occurred at a Sunoco located in the 100 block of North Craig Street in Pittsburgh on Monday, according to WPXI and WTAE.
The fight began when a customer threw a banana at the gas station employees, who then threw it back. The customer and staff then began throwing multiple bananas back and forth, police said.
The customer then punched one of the workers in the face, news reports said.
Employee Yubaraj Budhathoki, 26, of Pittsburgh, then chased the customer into the parking lot and hit him several times in the head with a PVC pipe.
The customer is currently hospitalized in critical condition. Police have not said if he is facing any charges.
The photo that was taken in Strasbourg led to news media around the world reporting on this cheating story.
Isa Kasimi, better known as Igors Rausis, the Latvian International Master and coach who was banned for six years and was stripped of his GM title after being caught cheating, has died at the age of 62. The news was confirmed by his ex-wife Olita after a post on Facebook by GM Alexei Shirov.
In December 2019, the FIDE Ethics and Disciplinary Commission banned Kasimi for six years and took away his grandmaster title after he was caught holding a phone in a toilet cubicle during the Strasbourg Open earlier that year. The ban would have expired on July 30, 2025.
He emphasized that he didn’t want to use his physical situation as an excuse: “I take full responsibility for myself. I cannot blame my weakness or my sickness or whatever. I did very dangerous things that may harm the entire chess world. I believe I did the most harmful thing you can do for chess.”
Tommy Orange’s ‘There There’ Sequel Is a Towering Achievement
“Wandering Stars” considers the fallout of colonization and the forced assimilation of Native Americans.
By Jonathan Escoffery
After completing the exceptional book I concur with the sentiment expressed by Mr. Escoffery.
Having spent time in the book world I know that, like the music world, there are many “one hit wonders.” Sometimes, somehow, the magic that was the first novel is lost with the second book. This is not one of those times. Asking which I like best would be like asking a parent which twin they prefer. These books will stand the test of time. Tommy Orange had something to say, and he wrote it beautifully.
Readers can find a plethora of reviews in many places, including the interwovenwebofallthings. This writer has previously been called “unconventional”, something I wear like a badge of honor. To be honest, I realize my words matter little, if that, when it comes to attempting to review books like There There and now, Wandering Stars, two of the best novels these eyes have ever seen. Therefore I have chosen to allow some of the words written by the author speak for themselves. The words chosen resonated with this reviewer. There is nothing that can be added to writing this good. If you are reading these words, obtain the books
pg 45
Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.
pg 95
I need to tell you about your father so that you might come to know him. He is making his way over there, on his journey home, and the dead want to be remembered before they journey home.
And yes he will be gone once he goes, but the dead are never far. They find us in dreams,
and keep teaching us from the inside long after they go, so you might find each other, in some blue-white field, or overgrown underbrush, or beneath a forest home you’ll remember but have never known.
pg 103
I don’t know where the Havens got that crazy name from. Cholly. He’s one of these mutts you don’t know what kinds of breeds are in him and you don’t much care because he seems all his own in the eyes. Well he’s only got the one eye, but it’s got more life in it than I’ve seen in some men with two. And I’ve seen worse men than those with no life in their eyes. It’s worse when they know what they want and they’re hungry for it,
white men in this country, they come to take everything, even themselves, they have taken so much they have lost themselves in the taking, and what will be left of such a nation once they are done? My mother once said, “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors, or how strong their weapons.” I wondered about American women. White women. Where were their hearts?
pg 132
You will begin to go to the library, become a member and read as much as you can about Indians. About Cheyennes. There won’t be much but you will read it all. American history, too. Even some world history. You will read Mark Twain and dislike him. Jack London will hold your interest for a while, and the librarian will tell you that he became a reader at Oakland Public Libraries. But you will hate the way Jack London writes about Indian people once you get to those books. You will ask the librarian what novels are written by Indian people and she will tell you that she doesn’t think there are any.
pg 143
But stories are for telling after the fact. And the one true fact about the afterlife is that nothing comes from there. Everything goes there.
pg 139
You will tell her you are bringing a new child into the world and you will begin to dream up the life you will all live together once she comes, as if she were bringing a bright future with her from that otherside, from the beforelife.
pg 198
A bad thing doesn’t stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you.
pg 221
Lony dreamed about dominoes. He dreamed that he was a domino tile, and that there were lines of dominoes as far as he could see, falling in rows that seemed to get closer and closer to him. In the dream he didn’t know when the line would come that would knock him over and end his life. He knew that being knocked over meant that, and that the line was his family line, that something had begun long before he was born that was coming to know him down, but that this was true of everyone, each family line falling down on top of the living when they die, all that they couldn’t carry, couldn’t resolve, couldn’t figure out, with all their weight.
pg 237
One thing you can do when it seems there’s nothing else you can do, which is to say when you feel restless, is to walk, move your body through space and let the wisdom of what comes from that be your guide.
pg 251
“Look it up. But tell me this, do you think Bob Marley’s American grandchildren living in America are trying to act like they’re real Jamaicans? Even Bob was half white.”
“Bob Marley’s American grandchildren?” Sean took a second to reregister the pill bottle. He wondered what Orvil was taking, if he was some kind of high. Orvil closed his locker and started to walk away.
“Hey, wait up though,” Sean said, and followed Orvil. He noticed just then that he was taller than Orvil by a good foot. “I mean I know who Bob Marley is, but I don’t know if I know what you’re talking about.”
“Bob Marley’s son Rohan grew up in Miami. He played football. Almost went pro. His kid ended up playing for the Washington Redskins. You know the buffalo soldiers were named because of what Indians called them because they thought their hair looked like buffalo hair?” Orvil was gripping a metal railing, kind of rocking a little back and forth.
“Buffalo soldiers? Oh yeah I know that song.
So you spend a lotta time on the internet.”
“Some of the Havasupai people, they’re the ones who live down in the Grand Canyon next to some waterfalls, they believe Bob to be the second coming of Crazy Horse. D’you know hella Native people love reggae music, love Bob Marley?”
“I mean. Everyone loves Bob Marley, but that is still pretty crazy,” Sean said.
“Horse,” Orvil said.
“What?”
“Well if you believe the Havasupai people, he was Crazy Horse.”
“Imagine. All these years. I don’t know why I been holding on to it, lord knows we don’t have the room for it, but we keep making room somehow, says every hoarder on those reality shows, ayyyy,” she said. Opal laughed a little at this, having watched some of those shows.
pg 268
Loother’s on his phone too. He’s playing chess, which he first started playing because he thought it’d make him seem smart and because Vee plays, so they play each other, but then he kept playing because he legit like it, like once he got past the beginning stages where he didn’t know what to move and he was just moving with no plan, it started to feel really full, like a really big game.
It was one thing to be grateful for the ancestors, and another thing to know them on the page. I always felt like we didn’t do good enough. That our family line was in some way weak. And yes weakened by the effects of history, colonization, historical trauma. But also not strong enough to pass down the traditions or language successfully. Because we lacked something. I hadn’t considered everything that had happened. How far back it’d been happening to us. We come from prisoners of a long war that didn’t stop even when it stopped. Was still being fought when my mom helped take over Alcatraz. I was part of the fight too. So were my grandchildren. But surviving wasn’t enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person. And yes it would be nice if the rest of the country understood that not all of us have our culture or language intact directly because of what happened to our people, how we were systematically wiped out from the outside in and then the inside out, and consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions, but we needed to understand it for ourselves. The extent we made it through. The extent.
pg 312
School was a waste of fucking time. Literally. A factory farm for future office cows.
pg 326
“I don’t trust people who just believe, like without knowing anything or because they need to believe what they want to believe in more than they care about whether the thing they’re believing in is worthy of believing in, but I wouldn’t ever want to become a nonbeliever. Like how most adults end up. Kids know something you actively try to make us lose. You know that, right?” “Make you lose what?” “You know what I mean, Jacquie Red Feather.”
pg 352
I’m being asked to understand that with some people you love, they just won’t end up being a part of your life. I’m being asked a question that it seems I can answer only by living.
pg 366
And it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand. – Clarice Lispector
pg 378
As for my higher power, I never found my way.
pg 381
No one noticed us, but that was the point. Sometimes a good sound is just supposed to be good enough to not be noticed. Rarely is anything so good a crowd gathers. Not at this kind of gig. There’s this old French composer I love named Erik Satie who wanted to compose what he called furniture music, by which he meant background music, music not meant to be noticed but to kind of just fill the room, which would now be called ambient music, but this was in the late 1800s, so pretty far ahead of his time, I’d say.
Granted, my taste in reading as I’ve aged has usually been non-fiction. An example would be the stack of recent books, some read, most yet to be read, concerning the JFK assassination. One of the reasons I stopped writing the blog was to have more time to read. Another reason was I thought there was nothing else to be said. Once again, I was wrong.
Later this headline garnered my attention:
Tommy Orange’s ‘There There’ Sequel Is a Towering Achievement
“Wandering Stars” considers the fallout of colonization and the forced assimilation of Native Americans.
“Whoa,” I thought, “that’s high praise one does not often see.”
Truth be told, I am the kinda guy who, after reading the magnificent Magister Ludi, by Hermann Hesse,
simply had to read his entire oeuvre. Therefore I “just had” to read There There prior to reading Wandering Stars. An immediate request was made to my local library, the Decatur branch of the Dekalb County Library System, and a few days later the book, a hardback obviously read by many readers, was checked out and DEVOURED. It would have been read in two sittings but life intervened (don’t you just hate it when that happens?!) and it was finished in three.
Before completion of the book a request was made for Wandering Stars. Prior to heading to the Library I checked to learn if any requested books would be waiting, and was disappointed to see none were ready for my grubby little hands to hold. Drats…
When checking in the books the nice lady behind the counter asked if I would like to check out one of the requested books that had just come out, but had yet to be placed in the “B” section of books awaiting other grubby little hands. She held up Wandering Stars.
“WOULD I!” was my only thought. It turned out to be a paperback with LARGE PRINT and my grubby little hands would be the very first to read the book, my very first LARGE PRINT book. “Life ain’t so bad,” I thought when checking out , while grinning like the cat who ate the canary.
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY!
The plan, Stan, is to review There There today and Wandering Stars later, if life does not intervene… I have not read any reviews prior to writing, and look forward to reading, and listening, to the reviews, and especially to listening to the author talk about his book. For those of you who prefer reading, or listening, prior to actually reading the book: (https://w3.ric.edu/obom/Documents/There-There-Reading-Notes.pdf)(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsHNaoJbMlg)
There There, by Tommy Orange
The book, There There, hits one like a Mike Tyson left hook to the kidney.
I was completely captivated and riveted while reading and could not put it down.
‘Back in the day’ a female relative married a Native American, Henry Yawn. Half a century ago I worked and traveled with Henry. It was the early 70s and we would work all day, have dinner, and talk prior to Henry going to sleep for the night. I would stay up late studying Chess because I had been hooked, lined, and sinker’d by the game. Much was learned from the man, whom I admired.
Decades later there was a tempestuous relationship with a woman who was a Cherokee Native American, but had been raised by her parents, both Cherokee, to be an American. We resided in what had earlier been the “stomping grounds” of the Cherokee Nation. (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2022/08/21/the-georgia-guidestones/)
The Native Americans saved the first settlers from Europe from starvation. In return the Europeans attempted to eradicate the original Americans. The crazed Union General William Tecumseh Sherman,
after laying waste to my city, Atlanta, and state, Georgia, went west and perpetuated genocide upon the Native Americans, for which history records him a great man. One can read a plethora of quotes from Sherman, such as my favorite:
“Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.” William Tecumseh Sherman
What else do you need to know about those particular yankmees?
“I intend to make Georgia howl.” William Tecumseh Sherman
“My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.” William Tecumseh Sherman
“The more Indians we can kill… the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.” William Tecumseh Sherman
“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children… during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” William Tecumseh Sherman
“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” William Tecumseh Sherman
It was not only Southern people Sherman hated:
“…[We] must stop these swarms of Jews who are trading, bartering and robbing.” William Tecumseh Sherman
One of the facts concerning the War of Northern Aggression is little known to northern people, and that is the fact that most Native Americans fought with the CONFEDERACY! Think about it…
‘Back in the day’ I had to sit in school listening to teachers telling me to read all about how wonderful it was for the northern heathens to “win the Civil War”, when the fact is that it certainly was not “wonderful” for the Southern people, or the Native Americans who were practically wiped out by the yankmees. Most Southern people were taught to keep the RAGE within, for obvious reasons. I’ve grown too old to “keep it in” any longer. It is no longer RAGE, but OUTRAGE! Now try to imagine how the Native American people feel…
What follows are only some of the things I copied by typing from the book when reading:
Prologue
In the dark time Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.
-Bertolt Brecht
pg 29
Dene puts his headphones on, shuffles the music on his phone, skips several songs and stays on “There There” by Radiohead. The hook is “Just cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”
pg 57
“Opal Viola, baby girl,” my mom said, and moved some hair behind my ear. She’d never, not once, called me baby girl.
“You have to know what’s going on here,” she said. “You’re old enough to know now, and I’m sorry I haven’t told you before. Opal, you have to know that we should never not tell our stories, and that no one is too young to hear. We’re all here because of a lie. They been lying to us since they came. They’re lying to us now!”
The way she said, “They’re lying to us now” scared me. Like it had two different meanings and I didn’t know what either one was. I asked my mom what the lie was, but she just stared off toward the sun, her whole face became a squint. I didn’t know what to do except to sit there and wait to see what she would say. A cold wind laid into our faces, made us close our eyes to it. With my eyes closed, I asked my mom what we were gonna do. She told me we could only do what we could do, and that the monster that was the machine that was the government had no intention of slowing itself down for a long enough to truly look back to see what happened. To make it right. And so what we could do had everything to do with being able to understand where we came from, what happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our stories. She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories. And then, as if all of it was leading up to what she was gonna say next, my mom paused a long pause, looked off toward the city, and told me that she had cancer. The whole island disappeared then. Everything. I stood up and walked away without knowing where to. I remembered I left Two Shoes over by those rocks all that time before.
When I got to Two Shoes he was on his side and in bad shape, like something had chewed on him, or like the wind and salt had dimmed him down. I picked him up and looked at his face. I couldn’t see the shine in his eyes anymore. I put him back down like he’d been. Left him like that.
pg 67
I find out that the same neurotransmitter related to happiness and well-being supposedly has to do with your gastrointestinal system. There’s something wrong with my serotonin levels. I read about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are antidepressants. Would I have to take antidepressants? Or would I have to reuptake them?
pg 82-83
Yes, things look bad these days. Everyone talks like it’s getting better and that just makes it all the worse that it’s still so bad. It’s the same with his own life. Karen tells him to stay positive. But you have to achieve positivity in order to maintain it. He loves her though. All the way. And he tries, he really tries to see it as being okay. It just seems like young people have taken over the place. Even the old people in charge, they’re acting like kids. There’s no more scope, no vision, no depth. We want it now and we want it new. This world is a mean curve ball thrown by an overly excited, steroid-fueled kid pitcher, who no more cares about the integrity of the game than he does about the Costa Ricans who painstakingly stitch the balls together by hand.
pg 136
We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. We are Urban Indians and Indigenous Indians, Rez Indians and Indians from Mexico and Central and South America. We are Alaskan Native Indians, Native Hawaiians, and European expatriate Indians, Indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized Indian kinds of Indians. We are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eights, sixteenths, thirty second. Undoable math. Insignificant remainders.
pg 152
Octavio walks back to the couch. “Fuck!” he says, and kicks the table. Daniel goes back to mindlessly playing chess on his computer. He suicides a bishop for his opponent’s knight to mess up his formation.
Part III pg 157
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. -James Baldwin
After pausing the blog during the pandemic I was amazed by the number of readers during that year of not writing. The same has happened after ending the blog.
Occasionally things have crossed my radar that received serious thought to posting, but until now the urge was resisted. Things changed after reading a poem, which was sent to my friend The Chess Playing Poet (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/the-chess-playing-poet/), Dennis Fritzinger. This was the reply:
Hi Mike,
Still going strong. Great poem you included below—I had to read it several times I enjoyed it so much.
Dennis
Now you know why I “just had” to post it on the blog.
The Instrument
by Robert Winner
I’ve seen the mahogany grow pale under the huge shoulders of pianists, the curved beams brace themselves.
Such an army, so many games of chess on the infinity of the keyboard, so much access and self-disclosure . . .
It’s like climbing into a forest formed by your own hands, or singing with your armpits, groin and heels . . . it’s playing Mozart in the Amazon to a naked wondering people.
Music—the world that might be, and yet the world as it is. The heart comes out of hiding, saying to us: “Listen, you can say anything you want now. Here is the instrument.”
Armchair Warrior 