By Justin Kendall

Kansas City’s West Bottom bohemian boys will soon be Northeasterners. Ron Megee and Jon Fulton Adams are selling their West Bottoms loft and moving to the Old Northeast neighborhood.

This means the end of the Student Union, the theme party paradise Megee and Adams hosted in their loft. Last weekend, Megee and Adams held an estate sale to unload their excess – including the giant iconic “R” above the stairway (sticker price, $150).

Click on the photo to see the best of Megee and Adams' booty.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

In an election season, a tasteful “meet-and-greet” cocktail reception or brunch for a political candidate (with ample opportunity and pens for check-writing) is practically de rigueur for Kansas City hosts and hostesses with social consciousness – and spacious living rooms.

Last Sunday, Jordan and Betty Bushman opened their beautifully appointed Plaza condominium for just such a soiree.

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By DAVID MARTIN

Anthony Ragusa used to own a liquor store at 27th and Troost. B&C Party Shoppe did a brisk

Tony Ragusa

In May, Mayor Mark Funkhouser and members of the city council gathered in the parking lot of the old store to announce their support of the Black Heritage District, a plan to eliminate the sales tax in a 20-block area in order to attract business to the East Side.

In a feature story about the initiative, I wrote that B&C Party Shoppe had gone out of business. This was not accurate.

“They forced me out,” Ragusa says.

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By CHRIS PACKHAM

Someday, my name will be prefaced with the phrase "wealthy financier," and then you'll all be fuckin' sorry. Specifically, when wealthy financier Chris Packham launches a billion-dollar-losing media empire in Kansas City with heavy editorial application of multi-morpheme sobriquets based on the word douche. Attention Fox 4: WE WILL BURY YOU. It's always embarrassing when your city produces so little telegenic news that you're forced to cover a MASSIVE BARN FIRE! I've been hearing scattered references to Kansas City as New York's "6th borough" or "7th borough" or something, but this shit is just going to reinforce the pre-existing stereotype of Kansas City Klansmen jumping their General Lees over flaming pits of biology textbooks. Our solemn vow to you, the sophisticated Kansas Citian, is that The Pitch will never cover barn fires, traffic jams caused by loose cattle, or first-cousin wedding announcements. On the other hand, by linking to barn-fire coverage, we're now driving traffic, including any monocle-wearing cosmopolitans from Eastern states, directly at the apparent hayseed provincialism of the Fox 4 worldview. After the jump, some reassuring evidence of Kansas City's post-secondary education. Click here, or on this picture of Pretty Pony Phil Witt receiving his associate's degree in handsome HVAC:

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By ALAN SCHERSTUHL

New and old liberal symbols?

Dear conservatives:

Nice to finally meet you. Long time, first time and all that. Recently, I've enjoyed your blog posts, reviews, and message board postings and editorials about how Wall-E is an anti-corporate, environmental polemic crafted by Hollywood elitists to indoctrinate our kids.

Like you, I don’t care for entertainment that gets too pushy with its political agenda-- Lord knows I'll never shove my way through a second Orson Scott Card novel. But, really, you're reaching here. The key “political” elements of Wall-E are so over-the-top satirical that they have little to do with the politics of 2008. Worse, when you assume that they do somehow reflect the current political garbagescape, you betray a self-image problem far more horrific than any binge-and-purger's.

Spoilers follow after the jump:

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By CAROLYN SZCZEPANSKI

For a critically acclaimed movie about a hometown war veteran, "Body of War" didn't stick around long in Kansas City movie theaters. The Phil Donahue-directed documentary intimately details the life of Northland native Tomas Young, who was paralyzed from the chest down after serving just five days in Iraq and came home to become a tireless anti-war activist.

When the movie debuted earlier this year, even some of the most ardent local peace advocates missed its short run at the Tivoli. But the curiosity of nurses at St. Luke's Hospital has brought the film back to KC for a brief second run.

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By NADIA PFLAUM

Yesterday, I sat down with a candidate running for the 6th district Congressional seat whose name isn’t Kay or Sam.

Dave Browning is the Libertarian candidate for Congress. We meet in the back of Clint’s Comics at 39th and Main, where he’s part owner. He follows my eyes to a rack full of Playboy magazines from the ‘70s and ‘80s and laughs, “I wonder how many of those came from my collection.” He calls Clint’s “my only toehold in the city.” He lives in a rural town beyond Grain Valley and works as a divorce lawyer in Independence.

He’s an entertaining guy, full of stories about the radical founders of our country (did you know Andrew Jackson beat a would-be assassin with his cane on the White House steps?). He believes in a non-intervention policy on war, solid currency backed by gold or silver, free trade and strictly limited government. He and his fellow Libertarians would like to see the country run as it was in the good ol’ days – “good” according to them, at least -- when the Constitution was the only rule in town.

For this, he says, his Democrat and Republican friends think he’s one signature short of a complete Bill of Rights.

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By CHRIS PACKHAM

My house was confiscated by the Downtown Improvement District last Monday. It turns out that there's a little-known constitutional power laid out by America's powdered-wig-wearing founding fathers, which is known today as Tom Clancy's Right of Eminent Domain, because The Man — as seen in country clubs and Republican Party fundraisers — can take what's yours Without Remorse via Executive Orders in the event of a Clear and Present Danger and just give it to somebody else. I'm a rebel, and I reject your precious rules, but that means nothing to a phalanx of armored lawyers backed up by teams of bulldozers that are already idling amid clouds of diesel exhaust.

The state is required to pay fair market value for confiscated property, but last year I dumped some barrels of oil and various toxins on the lawn in order to get on that sweet, sweet Superfund Cleanup gravy train. So payment of "fair market value" turned out to be presenting me with an enormous bill for polluting what had just become the property of the city of Kansas City. Now that oil is up to $142 a barrel, I'm wishing I'd held on to a few of those barrels I dumped in the yard so I could sell them on eBay.

Now I'm trying to convince my girlfriend to buy a scooter, because gas prices are going to skyrocket, and also because I want to ride around on it when nobody's looking. After the jump, other embarrassing tips for surviving the coming economic collapse — click here, here or on this picture of Tom Joad wearing a fanny pack:

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By JUSTIN KENDALL

A couple weekends ago, I stopped in the Plaza Barnes & Noble to buy The Great Derangement, the latest book by Rolling Stone political columnist Matt Taibbi. I found the book on display on the second floor, and when I flipped open the top copy, a neatly folded note fell out.

I naively looked around in the midst of a Neo moment. Delusions of grandeur -- and my self-centered nature -- made me believe the note was for me. I looked over my shoulder and sheepishly peeked at the flowery stationery.

Alas, I am not “The One.” The note was for a “very handsome” man who had “made eyes” with someone on the bookstore's second floor on May 25. Damn.

Click on the note for a readable version, Neo.

By C.J. JANOVY

During a political summer leading up to a Democratic National Convention starring a charismatic young newcomer, it’s no surprise that a book about Bobby Kennedy’s short-lived 1968 presidential campaign is climbing the bestseller lists. Others might be interested in Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America because Barack Obama reminds them of Bobby Kennedy. But for those who live around here – and those of us too young to remember – what’s striking about Clarke’s book is realizing that Kennedy’s historic campaign kicked off in Kansas.

A nervous and hesitant Kennedy, not known for his public speaking skills, flew into Kansas City’s downtown airport on March 17, 1968. He continued to Kansas State University, where he’d already been booked to give a lecture. That speech, which Kennedy titled “Conflict in Vietnam and at Home,” changed everything.

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BY DAVID MARTIN

This week’s column describes the blocks that road builders and Chamber of Commerce types have put in front of light-rail efforts in Kansas City.

In 2001, highwaymen and rich guys like James B. Nutter Sr. bankrolled a campaign against the one and only light-rail plan the city has taken to voters. A neighborhood leader helped the bigwigs defeat the plan: former city councilwoman and current parks board member Aggie Stackhaus.

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By CHRIS PACKHAM

Wal-Mart has pulled its annual convention of flabby, middle-management retail drones out of Kansas City because we don't have a hotel that can accommodate 8,000 people in the continental breakfast/complimentary body-wash manner to which they've become accustomed. Apparently, this represents a loss of 8 million imaginary Americos to Kansas City, some of which local businesses had already factored into their budgets.

For dismayed business owners rebalancing their books, here's a hardcore accounting tip straight outta the Compton of auditing methodology: Those dollars are just as imaginary now as they were last week. As long as your budget includes anticipatory fantasy dollars, I say why not imagine even more pretend money? If anything, a pleasant reverie involving fat stacks of spendjamins, flashy private jets and lowriders with expensive height-adjustable hydraulic suspension systems will stave off depresson, or — best-case scenario — make them magically appear, à la The Secret. Other than that, I've got nothing. The wondrous Middle Earth alternate universe of your small business' finances is foreign to me, like Dungeons & Dragons.

After the jump, some stuff about Missouri prisons, and some area teens learning important lessons about recreational drinking. Click here, or on this Ronnie James Dio album cover that appeared when I typed "elf accountant" into Google Images:

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By CHRIS PACKHAM

Small Market Scribblings — the sports feature you've seen on this blog for several weeks — has, via the kind of "slingshot" gravity assist you learned about in your junior college orbital mechanics course, been flung out of Plog orbit and is now floating through space as the first and only Pitch sports blog. SMALL MARKET SCRIBBLINGS, you guys. For all of you pedants who leave comments on the Plog demanding that I show my math and also calling me a "faget," I've whipped up this chart of Keplerian orbital elements describing the maneuver:

Authored by Pitch freelancer and embarrassing sports savant Chris Rasmussen, it's a surprisingly accessible and funny roundup of sports news and analysis the whole family can enjoy, except on Wednesdays, when Chris will be covering sports-related sex scandals in what can only be described as biologically disgusting detail. But think about it: Without a free press, athletes would be totally free to inject deca-durabolin and other illegal performance enhancing drugs directly into their biceps and quadriceps and what-not, and then where would we be? In a horrible dystopic world where baseball players were the size of halfbacks. GO BACK TO FRANCE, George Orwell. Check out Small Market Scribblings by clicking on this very sentence you are currently reading, or on the awesome logo below:

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the blog of The Pitch's sister paper in St. Louis, the Riverfront Times.

By CHAD GARRISON

This celebrity news item comes a bit late, but what can I say? I wasn't on the invite list.

The infamous Paige Laurie tied the knot June 14.

Word is that Missouri's most eligible bachelorette, Wal-Mart heiress Paige Laurie, got hitched earlier this month in a secretive wedding in her hometown of Columbia.

I heard about the event only yesterday when a woman who worked the wedding absentmindedly told me about the soirée -- and then begged me not to repeat the news. Like everyone who worked the wedding, my source was forced to sign a confidentiality agreement promising she would not discuss the nuptials. The pact has apparently worked well, as I can't find a single news article about the ceremony on Google or LexisNexis.

Why all the secrecy? My guess is that Laurie's billionaire parents, Bill and Nancy Laurie, are still reeling from the 2004 cheating scandal involving their only child.

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By OWEN MORRIS

There's no concrete definition on what a good summer beer is, just that it should be light and refreshing, usually with a touch of citrus.

Last night, Gordon Biersch threw a tapping party (its second of the year) to debut its new summer brew. Power & Light District brewery's attempt is an excellent, very drinkable offering most noticeable for what it lacks: the sweetness commonly associated with summer beers.

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