Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

If I assembled a tag cloud of keywords from the letter I received from the National Weather Service this morning, it would include heavy use of the words "distasteful," "regrettable," "cease and desist," "never in a million years" and "horrible human being." So there goes my campaign to get federal meteorologists to start naming hurricanes after major diseases. If you heard that Hurricane Gonorrhea was approaching your city, wouldn't you evacuate? They're running out of hurricane names, and if they don't alter their nomenclature policy now, they're just going to wind up using made-up names, like pharmaceutical companies or fantasy novel titles. Hurricane NiQuitin CQ? YAWN. And I'm sorry, but I'd keep my political convention convened right the hell through Hurricane Gandalf, especially if it was about to destroy the childhood home of Piers Anthony.

As far as suspending my ongoing mail-in campaign to the National Weather Service, I'm an idea man, and if I kept all my ideas in my head, I'd get some kind of brain-based kidney stone. It just doesn't sound healthy. After the jump, a correction and some business about Henry Rollins. Click here, or — because I can't find a good photo of National Weather Service director Dr. John L. Hayes — click on this photo of Rutherford B. Hayes:

CORRECTION: Yesterday, I mistakenly reported about Sarah Palin's conviction for the serial murders of 13 prostitutes in Spokane, Washington's red-light district from 1996 to 1998. MY BAD! The killer was actually Robert Lee Yates Jr., who has never served the Alaska state government apparatus in any capacity and whose execution is scheduled for September 19 in the Washington State Penitentiary. So I hope that clears everything up. THANKS, SNOPES! On the other hand, nobody complained when I wrote about lovable old German physicist Karl Schwarzschild's science-based involvement in the mysterious disappearance of hitchhikers, but let's double-check with Snopes real quick ... nope, zero hits. I guess things would be looking pretty grim for Karl Schwarzschild if he weren't already dead, but as physicist Nancy Grace would say, just try telling that to the relatives of the people who mysteriously collapsed into gravitational singularities while hitchhiking through Germany in 1916.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is getting a lot of mileage out of the claim that maverick change-agent fiscal conservative Sarah Palin bravely opposed a massive federal earmark for a giant controversial Alaskan bridge project, which ultimately collapsed into a political singularity. On the other hand, Newsweek, the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal all report that she supported and fully endorsed the project and that when Congress stripped it from a spending bill, she fiscal-conservatively kept the money and applied it to a variety of other projects. So I guess it's a classic "she said, everyone else on the planet said"-type situation. But y'know? Even though respectable media outlets have asserted that the campaign is lying outright about the issue, I'm reserving judgment until Snopes.com weighs in.

Speaking of the delicious art of serial killing: Look, when you get to be my Jitterbug phone-eligible age, you don't have a lot of time to spend on your wardrobe or a bunch of girly primping. If I spent every morning fussily matching my topcoat with my pantaloons and elaborately oiling my golden curls, I'd be foppish WDAF Fox 4 dandy Phil Witt, and although I'd be making, like, a million dollars an hour, I wouldn't have time for all of my good works. So back in 2000, taking my cue from Seth Brundle, I finally picked out the look that works for me: Gray coat, black tie, white button-down shirt, and those little black shorts that Henry Rollins wore back when he was the dynamic frontman of Black Flag. Every day. It's conservative until I stand up from my desk, and then it reflects my radical anarchist roots while displaying my assets to their best effect.

So anyway, it comes as no surprise that convicted killer and alleged double-y-chromosome-possessing Charles Manson sent fan letters to Henry Rollins back in 1984:

Rollins outlined that he was very young when he started corresponding with Manson - who was sentenced to life in 1971 for the infamous Manson Family Murders which took place two years earlier.

"At the time I was very young and having him write me letters made me feel very intense and heavy," he said. "I'd always know I'd have a letter in my PO Box from him because the woman behind the counter at the post office would give you this awful look.

"His letters would always have swastikas on them so they were easy to spot."

That definitely made me reassess my definitions of "intense" and "heavy," which until today had been grounded in the intense, heavy performances of Henry Rollins, Ice T and Keanu Reeves in the seminal 1995 Johnny Mnemonic, which introduced the world to CYBERSPACE:

THE HOTTEST DATA ON EARTH. IN THE COOLEST HEAD IN TOWN. The ultimate hard drive, you guys. I will never get tired of this picture of cyberspace.