Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

Tight-ass narrative structuralist Oprah Winfrey famously pointed her pointer finger of literary disapprobation at James Frey's use of fiction techniques in his memoir A Million Little Pieces. I'll just go right out on a limb and say that, what with jobs and the TV, I'll probably never actually read it, but billionaire Oprah is wrong about that whole thing. Although if she wants to put the keys to a Toyota Prius under my seat, I'll at least listen to her compartmentalist theory of prissy narrative propriety. As far as I'm concerned, everything that gets written down has already passed through a messy, poopy filter of psychological quirks and subconscious biases, and if you believe anything you read, you deserve all the — whatever — privation and extraneous third nipples that life throws in your path.

So whether or not you decide to believe in the accuracy of her portrayal, The Kansas City Star's DeAnn Smith depicts the chairman of the board of the Truman Library Institute as having some kind of girly snitterbitch over Barack Obama's failure to take a guided tour of the museum after his speech at the Truman Memorial Building in Independence yesterday. There are a few passive-aggressive quotes about Obama's "missed opportunity" from chairman William "Bill" Nelson, as well as a comment that Obama "should have" given his speech at the more commodious Community of Christ auditorium.

Apparently, it's all who you know. And then over here you got favoritism, because there's this whole Reuters article about Obama's tour of Harry S. Truman's house a few blocks from the museum, which Smith never bothers to mention. The Reuters headline reads, "Obama gets a lesson in Truman history." All you get from Smith is Obama's apparent indifference and Nelson's sniffy condescension. Everyone comes off badly, including, as an unintended Thalidomide flipper-arm side-effect, DeAnn Smith. After the jump, all the Kansas City news I can press through an unreliable filter of ironic insincerity. Click here, or on this Oprah audience member dispiritedly irrigating her sinuses after finding nothing but a netti pot under her seat:

House go boom: If you don't let kids play openly with fireworks, they're just going to do it surreptitiously in the tight, enclosed spaces where you keep your combustible sacks of sawdust and cans of gasoline. Some kids in Brookside were playing with sparklers and firecrackers up in the attic and set the house on fire. First of all: Their patriotism is commendable. Kids, I salute you, while marching in place to John Philip Sousa. But second, as I seem to remember Jeff Goldblum portentously saying in Jurassic Park, "Nature will find a way." Like depriving a dinosaur of access to lysine, depriving children of access fireworks will only make them seek out alternative methods of detonating chemicals. For instance: If the parents of the kids in this story had handed them some bottle rockets and roman candles and sent them outside, they might still have a house.

Swept Away: Yael T. Abouhalkah engages in some weird second-degree cheerleading with his rave-up of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article raving up Cordish's Kansas City's Power ampersand Light District. Dispatch Reporter Tom Uhlenbrock went on a pub crawl through the district, having 18 drinks, which Abouhalkah enjoyed vicariously. Notwithstanding his, like, two degrees of separation from mojitos and doucheclubbers, Abouhalkah also felt like he was a big shot, getting "through the crowds of bikers and their babes" with a wave of Cordish marketing director Jon Stephens' hand. At the end of the somehow holodeckish experience of reading the article, Abouhalkah points out that "St. Louis officials are working with Cordish to develop a similar entertainment district in their downtown. In this case (as in many others), KC can boast it's more up to date than its smaller east-Missouri neighbor." Tomorrow: Abouhalkah reviews a St. Louis Post-Dispatch review of a magnificent dinner at Applebee's.