Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

From the Comments:

gus says: i feel dirty because i laughed so hard at "Rape Camp Intelligencer-Tribune" that people asked me what's so funny. i treid to explain how the Rape Camp Intelligencer had to have merged with the ribune at some point and that they still kept the name Rape Camp, and oh never mind.

Barack Obama watched his wife's speech at the Democratic National Convention from Kansas City last night — just like me! Today, Obama has some errands to run in Kansas City — JUST! LIKE! ME! Although, whereas the Democratic candidate for president has to go give a speech to some people at the American Airlines overhaul base at 11:15 a.m., I have to get my ass down to the payday loan place and write a check that I'm praying to God won't be presented until Thursday. Evening.

Still, we have quite a bit in common, once you set aside various law degrees, public offices held, relative personal charisma, prison sentences and outstanding bench warrants. You can probably sort out whose character stats are whose in the preceding list, but maybe if my life had taken a different path, I'd be a big-shot, too. As it is, new network nodes at the Daily Briefs Facebook page have stalled out lately, and rather than blaming it on my lack of burning charisma, popularity, intelligence or handsomeness, I'm going to deploy the all-purpose rhetorical sealing caulk John McCain produces whenever anybody asks a tough question and just say that when I was a POW*, my social network consisted of guards and a little mouse named Marvin. We didn't have Scrabulous or photo pages. Although I do seem to recall a "wall" we could write on. And also some unfortunate "poking."

*Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, 1999-2003

After the jump, why are so many kindergarten dropouts becoming prison inmates? Click here, or click on flute student Riki-Oh brandishing the warden's head after putting his body through a meat grinder in the cautionary documentary Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, the Scared Straight of Hong Kong:

Give up Barksdale or take the years, Caitlin: Kindergarten solves crime, according to some Kansas City police chiefs in a kind of reverse-slippery-slope argument whereby you defy gravity by slipping up a slope, and which goes like this: High-quality kindergarten reduces the likelihood that students will drop out of school later, making it less likely that they will get into legal trouble and consequently go to jail. And also, something like 70 percent of U.S. prison inmates never got their high school diplomas.

I'm not saying they're wrong. I think they're probably right. And I'm no law enforcement officer, but I am an avid student of the TV box. And I don't seem to remember Baltimore's Det. McNulty fancydancing around wearing a mortarboard and talking like Sydney the psychiatrist on M*A*S*H, a sitcom-like television show based on the premise of preaching my fucking ear off. "WAR BAD," you guys. Instead, I mostly remember McNulty busting shitbirds, screwing waitresses and drinking cheap beer down at the rail yard. Now, that's a good poe-lease. Not exactly how they do it in Kansas City, but things were never the same for the KCPD after that time on the bus when the chicken wouldn't shut up and OH, GOD, THE CHICKEN WAS A BABY, THE CHICKEN WAS A BABY! OH, SWEET, DEAR BABY-CHICKEN JESUS! A baby that apparently needs a better, less meth-addicted class of kindergarten teacher in order to stay out of jail.

Gypsy-wiccan ipicac: To paraphrase Fleetwood Mac in a way deliberately calibrated to gross you out, the days when The Kansas City Star laid Mayor Mark Funkhouser down in the tall grass and let him do his stuff are now a fond memory. As a gross back-up image for hardier readers, append "like the days when Lindsey Buckingham could sit in a chair without his doughnut-shaped prostate cushion" to the end of the previous sentence. If that doesn't do the trick, you'll just have to picture smelly old Stevie Nicks naked. "Like oatmeal with blond hair," is how a funny theater critic I know might put it.

The Star's Yael T. Abouhalkah is understandably hurt by Funkhouser's recent declaration that the paper is responsible for everything that's gone wrong with his administration. If anything, the Star was the sole holdout when all the stinky amateur blogs first started circulating the rumors about Gloria Squitiro's weird alleged workplace misbehavior.

But try telling that to a douchewitted, and apparently racist commenter called "Rogue" on the Star's Web site:

"Man I tell you the so-called columnists of this fish wrap think the sun rises and sets because of them. Just read this one if you doubt me.

Here is a hot flash for you, "Alphabet": A hell of a lot more people in this town believe that you and your fish wrap's staff are more insufferable than the mayor and his wife could be on their worst day!

Pathetic, absolutely pathetic."

Artist's rendering of how I picture Rogue provided by the South Carolina Sex Offender Registry. "Fish wrap?" Seriously? Are you still buying whole fish wrapped in newspaper from street vendors, granddad? Want to share any stories about President Taft or your years in the Ladies' Temperance League? All of this part of my new service of mocking the commenters on Midwest Voices, since Yael is too "grown-up" and "mature" and "responsible" to do it himself. I AM THE EQUALIZER.

This is awesome: