Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

It's Thursday, which means we're one day closer to the release of the summer's best movie. I don't mean to sound like a geek, but I've been lining my whole collection of American Girl dolls up on the dresser every night and organizing a pretend-quorum regarding who's the cutest: Shia Labeouf or Chace Crawford. Oh, I know it's really no contest, but li'l Addy Walker gets so worked up when I pretend that Shia's hair isn't weird or indescribable. She's adorable! That just about wraps up all my irony about little girls at this point; after the jump, a succession of other easy targets including, but not limited to, old people, the blind and baby animals. As a psychological test for which you will be judged and treated accordingly, you may click on either of the following images to continue:

Someday, Lenny, we'll have a farm: Giant, shambling Mayor Mark Funkhouser is losing the difficult-to-lose support of Kansas City Star columnists pretty much across the board. It's not any one thing he's done; it's just that he's been consistently crushing best managerial practices with his thick, clumsy hands, by petting them too hard. Now even Barb Shelly is saying she's "mad," which I'm having a hard time picturing in my head, like if Yael Abouhalkah wrote about his years in a Fight Club-like underground boxing league. Her point is that Funkhouser was warned that employing his wife as an unpaid volunteer with all the responsibilities of an office manager, like doing the "neutral drop" maneuver in your dad's car, was just asking for trouble, which has now manifested in the form of an EEOC complaint and a lawsuit -- one for which Funkhouser and his wife would (allegedly) very much like pro bono legal representation, if at all possible, please.

That lovin' feeling: Amidst all the talk about disharmony within in the Democratic party, let's not forget that the Republican party is having trouble rallying around gerontogeous candidate John McCain for a whole variety of reasons ranging from his support of the Iraq war and generally pugnacious approach to foreign policy, to his hippie-ish tendency to occasionally support Democratic initiatives, like, five percent of the time. The Hill reports that 14 Republican members of congress refuse to back or publicly endorse McCain. Also, some Democratic women who support Hillary Clinton have decided that McCain best embodies the qualities they seek in a female president, or something. So, to John McCain, I say: You go, girl! Straddling the political divide between the hawks who haven't yet finished the job of carpet-bombing Iraqi neonatal intensive care units and the women who would like to see more taxpayer dollars for building neonatal intensive care units can't be easy, but maybe you should consider adopting the pant-suit for your stump appearances.

Prairie Village residents have never smelled hot garbage before: It's another symptom of America's energy crisis -- obviously, I've unilaterally decided to start calling it a crisis and begin stocking my bomb shelter with freeze-dried astronaut ice cream and 10W-40. I'm also exploring the plausibility of making one of those There Will Be Blood open pools of raw crude in my back yard. It seems like a giant mess, but I figure desperate times call for seriously pissing off my neighbors, with their Hillary yard signs and their stupid little scottie dog, and all I'd need to start the process is a pond liner. Anyway! In Prairie Village, Deffenbaugh remapped all their garbage pickup routes for energy efficiency, and trash pickup was apparently a day or two late once the new routes kicked in. Coddled Prairie Village residents could! Not! Believe it! Kind of like 18th-century French aristocracy encountering dogs fucking in the road. Which is more remarkable? That Suburban Kansans have never before endured the squalor of unemptied garbage dumpsters, or that KMBC Channel 9 devoted time and manpower to covering the story?

You have got to be fucking kidding me:

Click for the ugly.