Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

Ha ha, today I am Teevee Barnhart: Variety reports Brillstein-Grey TV co-topper Susie Fitzgerald has been tapped as prexy of Josephson Entertainment. Rising from co-topper to prexy could be seen as more of a lateral move than a promotion, in my experience. Reading this shit aloud sounds like old people using slang from the 1800s, and the only reason I'm linking horrible fucking Variety and its "23-skidoo" house style is because Josephson Entertainment will produce The Weekly, a single-camera workplace comedy "percolating in the script stage" at ABC, about "the office of a dishy alternative weekly publication and blog." Now I know how the line workers at a bottling plant must have felt when they heard about Laverne and Shirley! Or how the convicted rapists felt when they heard about HBO's workplace comedy Oz. OK, one more: or how cocksuckers felt when they heard about Deadwood. That joke dedicated to Deadwood fan Bob Packham, my dad.

If I were "tapped" to "scribe" The Weekly, I would totally write the episode in which we cut half a page to a quarter because an event in the calendar fell through, blah blah, cutline blah blah, jargon, and you totally know this thing will be like Sex and the City with nose rings and ironic T-shirts. TV is not always the worst — for instance, it's awesome when it tells stories about Battlestars or Detective McNulty — but this has the unmistakable whiff of horrible, usually depicted by cartoonists as wavy stink lines. After the jump, some stuff about deregulation and marijuana! Click here, or on TV's Automan, a workplace comedy about a hologram that comes to life and fights crime, starring Desi Arnaz Jr. and Chuck Wagner:

Deregulation is the best at unregulated sucking: Midwest Airlines is reducing flights from Kansas City this fall, thanks to the economy and fuel prices. I just thank my strict constructionist God that vital infrastructure components like airlines aren't nationalized in the United States, because it really takes the competition of free markets to be incredibly shitty at running a transportation business. Don't get me wrong — I'm well aware that Amtrak never figured out how to be self-sustaining, but at least it's had increasing ridership for the past five years. I know, I know, we have to remove every possible legal restriction from businesses in order for the country to thrive, but somebody please explain to me the part where deregulation didn't make every single person I know hate every single part of the flying experience, from the moment you pay for the ticket to the moment that the pilot tells everyone on the plane to go fuck themselves in that avuncular, casual voice pilots use on the intercom. I guess federal oversight would only make people hate flying more.

We're all snorting drugs up our snort holes: KMBC Channel 9 reports on a study by a company called Quest Diagnostics, which to my sexy, jaded ears sounds like a company that makes medical imaging equipment for the dwarf warriors of Azeroth. That was a little joke for the dorks, brought to you with limited commercial interruption by Blizzard Entertainment, reminding you to get tested if you think you've been exposed to blood corruption. I think maybe Quest Diagnostics runs urine tests on Brush Creek, because in the course of doing whatever it is they do, they report that Kansas City, Missouri, residents are a whopping 80 percent more likely to test positive for amphetamines than the national average, 60 percent more for marijuana and 30 percent more for cocaine. Those are some pretty large-scale numbers, but I can't even go to church in this town without someone offering me a little blow. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there's a day-care center on my street called Li'l Tweaker's KinderCare.

However, Jim Nunnelly, the administrator of Jackson County's COMBAT anti-drug strike force, says the high number of positive screenings is more like an indicator of a higher number of drug tests. It's like hot and cold running urine in this town, if you want a job. I guess nobody trusts anybody else to drive a school bus anymore, but that doesn't stop The Kansas City Star from running with the headline "Kansas City area is failing when tested for drugs."