Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

"What? There's a collapse in the housing market? Get me Banjo on the line!" I don't give a damn about this article. But the fact that The Wall Street Journal employs a reporter named Shelly Banjo is fantastic. I can only assume that her job interview went in accordance with this brief re-enactment starring the Verne Troyer sex tape as Rupert Murdoch and introducing the Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Pancakes & Sausage On a Stick as Shelly Banjo, girl reporter:

G'day, y'snagger two-bob Sheila. What's y'name?

Shelly Banjo.

Fair suck of the sav! That's a corker, ya bewdy-bottler mappa tassie! Strewth, yer hired!

What?

After the jump, if you can successfully read an entire synopsis of the Gloria Squitiro City Hall debacle, you can claim a WONDROUS PRIZE! Plus, watching fancy lads slap at each other is both funny and dispiriting. Click here, or on Shelly Banjo's Banjo Marketwatch:

We'll all laugh at this years from now, and also right now: World-bestriding nepotist and King Size Catalog enthusiast Mayor Mark Funkhouser has now inspired The Kansas City Star's mild-mannered Yael T. Abouhalkah to the use of exclamation points — some pretty aggro punctuation, for sure, and Yael restrains himself to just one, in the headline ... for now. But it's a 50-cent cab ride from one exclamation point to all-red-caps with multiple exclamation points and a picture of Gemma Atkinson wearing a bikini, and now that genie is out of the bottle. Yaelskansascity.com, you guys.

To recap the whole municipally embarrassing story: Funkhouser's wife, Gloria Squitiro, has an unspecified volunteer position in City Hall, where she allegedly bullies the paid employees with allegedly racist terminology and some pretty gross sexual single-entendres. All of that wrapped up in "allegedlies" and poured out on the ground for my homies in the legal department. A City Hall employee files an EEOC complaint and a lawsuit against the city, which, according to rumor, Funkhouser's legal counsel doesn't believe it can win. The City Council is now attempting to protect the city by passing a new policy restricting volunteers from working for their own relatives. On Chris Stigall's show last week, Funkhouser came right out and said he'd ignore any new policy duly passed by the City Council. If you read all that, CONGRATULATIONS, THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY IS YOURS!!!! The short version is that the mayor gets to ignore city ordinances, which is awesome. I am totally throwing my power-lifting exercise belt into the ring and running for mayor after Funkhouser is recalled, or whatever. Mayoral Immunity, you guys. I'll be able to park anywhere. I am totally going to be like the bad guys from Lethal Weapon 2, only not racist and shit, because racism is uncool. Stay in school. Stop snitching.

Hot fancy-lad-on-fancy-lad action: Look. I'm as firmly against the whole bigoted American strain of anti-intellectualism as the next James Wolcott. There's nothing I love more than sucking down a Stephen Wolfram book before breakfast and then flexing my muscley neocortex and also my brain's biceps and abdominals in the mirror before running off to my job mentally lifting heavy shit with my brain's legs and not my brain's back, followed by my volunteer work teaching children how to solve differential calculus problems by staring at them. But if the only alternative to the cro-magnons who invented Freedom Fries and the Blue Collar Comedy Tour are the fancy lads who enjoy igniting prissy, farty literary spats in East Coast periodicals, I'm going to start following Bill Engvall across the country, like a Deadhead whose mom and dad are cousins.

This weekend, How Fiction Works, a pretty much universally praised literary primer by fancy lad James Wood, got the most unintentionally funny critical girly-slap I've ever seen for a book that I will never, ever read. In The New York Times, author and fancy lad Walter Kirn describes the book in his lede as "an old-fashioned primer on literature that also functions as a timely primer on the art of modest self-marketing...," concluding with, "But there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap." MEEEE-YOW! Somebody get Miss Kirn's vagina a bowl of milk!!!!

I can only count the ways I hated this review on three of my four polydactyl hands, so I guess it isn't all that bad, but I will say that Kirn is so persistently annoyed by Wood's monocle-wearing tweediness that he fails to notice his own monocle-wearing tweediness, dropping images like, "(Wood) flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic..." HAHA! That sentence went to a Swiss finishing school for young ladies. In conclusion, fancy lads who graduated from Princeton and nibble on sweet biscuits in glass salons shouldn't fling their hairbrushes. Thank you.