Kansas City News Blog

​Macramae brings many horrible memories flooding back to me. Not this bad (allegedly), but bad nonetheless.

This week, the Crap Archivist relived his own tortured memories while getting tangled up in Creating With Macrame. Damn if the guy on the right doesn't look like he's wearing one of Chewbacca's relatives.

Here comes some Star Wars nerdery courtesy of one of our favorite commenters, THC:

I always wondered if Ewoks were just the Fun Size Wookies given out on Halloween.

For The Win.

Also, this week, a special honorable mention to Caroline, who referenced Kansas football coach Mark Mangino's gravitational pull ...

Nut up, KU players. Take responsibility for your altercations with the basketball team and for your losses and move forward. Many coaches yell and physically interact with players. If you want to transfer, then do it, but don't blame the couch (typo and it stays). And he probably didn't mean to physically interact with a player, the kid probably just got sucked up in his force field.

and newly suspended Chiefs receiver Dwayne Bowe's dreaded illness ...

Poor Dwayne Bowe. His prescriptions for the dreaded conditions of Butterfingeritis and Ham Hands must not be on the league's approved drug list.

Gordon Reabe Jr.

​A federal judge sentenced the three pea brains sexual assault scammers who cooked up -- and botched -- a scheme to defraud a local car dealership.

Julie Bernet, 39, of Bacyrus, Kansas, and Lindsey Crawford, 24, of KCMO, hatched a bizarre plan to gold-dig a big sexual assault settlement out of a former employer by staging an assault/sexual assault (want details?) and trying to link it to the dealership.

Bernet and Crawford paid Gordon Reabe, Jr., 52, of Lee's Summit, $100,000 to assault them -- and sexually assault one of them -- in an effort to force a higher settlement from the Mercedes-Benz of Kansas City dealership.

Now that plan is a Swiss-fucking-watch.

All three pleaded guilty (Reabe, Bernet and Crawford)  after police figured out that it was a hoax.

For his trouble, Reabe got a year and a day in federal prison without parole. Bernet received five months in a residential re-entry center and five months of house arrest. Crawford got three years probation. Each agreed to pay $5,259 to offset costs that Kansas City police incurred while investigating the non-existent crime.

​Picture the young artist, dreaming of becoming an editorial cartoonist. He's working hard: drawing for a weekly newspaper in the Omaha suburb of Bellevue, placing his pieces in a few small-town papers around Nebraska, constantly submitting his work to the Omaha World-Herald, only to be rejected. With encouragement from Kansas City Star cartoonist Lee Judge, at the time practically just a kid himself, our artist has started doing an occasional sports cartoon for the Star.

Until now he's had a weird life. His loose-hinged father is, among other disturbing things, beset by nervous tics that our cartoonist has inherited. As a child, our man had a tendency to poke his pinky into gooey cracks in the floor or lick window glass on the bus. He still must exert heroic effort to keep from sticking out his tongue at inappropriate times.

A Kansas City Royal comes to his psychological rescue.

The cartoonist is in the darkroom at his little newspaper, studying the Royals' roster, when he comes across the story of outfielder Jim Eisenreich.

After he was released by the Minnesota Twins, his contract was picked up by the Royals for one dollar. A bargain, as my father might say. What gives me pause is the mention of his tics. Although Eisenreich was a talented player, his symptoms were so bad that in Minnesota he was often booed off the field. As I read about his vocal tics and strange head and arm movements, I marvel at our similarities.

After Eisenreich's arrival in Kansas City, the story goes on to explain, a doctor diagnosed him with Tourette's syndrome.

Over the next few days in his darkroom, the cartoonist -- Jeffrey Koterba, now full time at the World-Herald and author of the gorgeous new memoir Inklings (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 288 pages, $25), can't stop thinking about Eisenreich.

I imagine him living in a modern, sprawling house, tootling around Kansas City's boulevards, dining in fancy restaurants, managing his syndrome as best he can. And like Kansas City, this syndrome that plagues him seems remote. My cartoons, my signature, "Koterba," may appear in print in Kansas City, but I exist in Omaha, struggling in my new marriage, taking care of a sick baby, paying hospital bills, making ends meet. Yet on deadline nights, when I climb into bed next to Joni with my smudged fingers, only to wake three hours later, I remind myself there was a time when I believed no woman would ever love me. To have this, at least, is nothing short of a miracle.

There are other miracles, too.

Photo from America's Most Wanted

​The Kansas Supreme Court ruled today that the man convicted of murdering Ali Kemp, a 19-year-old University of Kansas student from Johnson County, in a public swimming pool pump room in 2002 could not also be guilty of attempted rape without violating the "double jeopardy" protection of the Fifth Amendment.

In 2005, Kemp's murderer, Benjamin Appleby (aka Teddy Hoover), was convicted of first degree murder and attempted rape. He got a "hard 50" year sentence (five decades without the possibility of parole) for the murder conviction, and 228 months for the attempted rape, to be served consecutively.

The court ruled that since attempted rape is one of the two provisions that make a homicide first degree murder (the other is premeditation), convicting Appleby of attempted rape was double-dipping.

As such, the 228 month sentence was overturned. Appleby started serving the hard 50 in 2007. He'll be 81 when his debt to society is paid.

As we've thoroughly documented here, last night Kansas City's favorite performers gathered to declaim from Sarah Palin's new book, Amelia Bedelia Runs For Office. This time, Amelia's literal-mindedness accidentally destroys the Republican Party for a whole generation!

Also, she tries to teach herself to fly and goes kerplump on an Alaskan boardwalk full of Alaskan history and decency. Here are highlights from the first three readers, Ron Megee (in the ascot), David Wayne Reed (with the glasses) and Gail Bronfman Bunch (with both her knees scraped).


Dying camera batteries prevented me from capturing the epic and bosomy performance of Janet Henry, but, really, if I had, Tea Partiers might have drafted her impersonation as a third-party candidate. So it's probably for the best.

mlb.com

​It looks like the K is all but announced as the site of the 2012 All-Star Game. The MLB Owner's meeting just wrapped in Chicago, and Commissioner Bud Selig hinted that Kauffman Stadium's recent renovation has impressed a lot of people.

As a small digression, can you think of a better name for commissioner of baseball than "Bud." For some reason that just tickles me to no end. Yeah, I wrote "tickles," what of it?

Selig was quoted on MLB.com: "I haven't made a final decision, but we did promise (the Royals) an All-Star Game at some point. They did a magnificent job there. But I'm not going to say more than I've said."

Esther Lin/STRIKEFORCE

Rudy Bears is on the right. Nice tatt.

​If you met mixed martial arts fighter Rudy Bears in a darkened alley, you'd probably ask for directions. Heck, he'd probably offer them.

Outside the ring, the 31-year-old Independence man (Truman High class of '98) has an air of relaxed calm about him. You might even say soft spoken. Yet in the ring, he sheds his approachable demeanor and becomes a vicious beast.

Tonight, at Memorial Hall in KCK, Bears (10-3-0) will square off against undefeated up-and-comer Tyron Woodley (4-0) in tonight's STRIKEFORCE Challengers main event. Then, if Bears is successful he'll try to knee him in the kitchen and land a couple forearm strikes to his grill.

The Octagon

​

For those who don't know -- and since mixed martial arts is one of the fastest
growing sports in the country, there probably aren't too many of you --
the action takes place in a octagonal ring surrounded by a head-high
chain link fence. Competitors with lots of tattoos try to pummel each
other with whatever skills and appendages they have available until one
of them is knocked out, can no longer defend him/herself, or submits.

Bears says he's been preparing and training for the last two months at Caveman Crew Mixed Martial Arts, a pretty badass-looking gym in Raytown. People bleed there.

There are rules but not with respect to style, and fighters come from a variety of different people-hurting background. Bears, a 31-year-old with a wiry muscular frame, is trained in jujitsu and is mostly a stand-and-striker, which means he likes to fight on his feet.

Watch him pummel a dude after the jump.

Woodley, Bears' body-fat-lacking opponent, is a two-time All American wrestler for the University of Missouri, so Bears said he's been training counter-wrestling maneuvers. Bears is considered the underdog.

Bears says he likes fighting at home. "Definitely," he says. "They chant my name because of the movie Rudy."

The action starts tonight at 10 p.m. Undercards begin at 8 p.m.

Mark Mangino

​
University of Kansas football coach Mark Mangino is on the hot seat. KU's meter maids hate him. Former players hate him. The parents of former players hate him. Even some current players don't like him.

My decoder ring says Mangino has lost the confidence of Athletic Director Lew Perkins. But Perkins will be in a tough spot if the Jayhawks knock off No. 2-rated Texas in Austin 

What do you think KU should do with Mangino?

Janet Henry goes full Palin.

​The big news this week is that photogenic real American Sarah Palin has kinda/sorta written a Young Adult book about why everybody should quit their jobs. But books are hard and take time to read! Understanding the dilemma Going Rogue presents to non-elitists, local theater people last night performed the public service of reading Palin's book aloud at the Fishtank Performance Studio at 1715 Wyandotte.

There several dozen Crossroads types packed in a tiny room whose aluminum foil wall-paper suggests either '50s sci-fi or what life is like for a baked potato. A two buck donation was good for a can of Hamms. Organizer Lisa Cordes explained the rules: She'd edited the book down some, but promised "We did try to maintain the spirit, flavor and narrative of the tale." Also, we had to drink any time Palin:

• Mentions Ronald Reagan

• Uses folksy language

• Bashes the media

• Writes "Dang," "Give me a break" or "Bullcrap."

• Refers to any of the following children and/or potpourri flavors: Piper, Trigg, Track, Tripp, Willow or Bristol

Low comedy and much drunkenness ensued.

Burrel Mohler Jr.

​Fox 4 reports that the mother of the alleged sexual abuse victims and a former Mormon bishop in Independence knew about the allegations of sexual abuse inside the Mohler family. 

Ex-bishop Paul Tonga told Fox 4 that Burrel Mohler Jr.'s wife came to him several times and relayed fears that her husband was abusing their children.

Tonga, who was the leader of the church where Mohler Jr.'s worshiped, explained that he questioned Burrel Mohler Jr. and the children, but didn't learn anything.

"He denied the accusation," Tonga said. "Nobody admitted anything for the children."

Tonga said his investigation ended there. He did not explain why he never contacted police.

The Kansas City Star also reports that police confiscated 65 videotapes from an uncle of the alleged victims.