Kansas City News Blog

¿De que color es el autobus? Back when the thinly budgeted Kansas City Transportation Authority started the MAX express line from the City Market to Waldo, there was a lot of talk about the magickal properties that distinguished it from, for instance, the smelly old 57 line your grandparents are always going on about between defibrillations. One of the more fanciful Tolkien-grade claims about the MAX route was that sensors on downtown traffic lights could detect the buses and hold a yellow light, allowing the MAX to keep to its express line schedule. After riding the MAX line daily for two straight winters, and then after seeing a MAX bus at 20th and Main miss the yellow light and actually run a red light just yesterday, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that whole thing is a goddamn lie. I've never once seen a MAX bus hold a yellow light, ever, but I've sure seen them stop at a lot of fucking red lights while winding through the ridiculously circuitous downtown route. So that's just another lie that the city is built on, along with the affordability of TIFs and the etymology of "mammy."

After the jump, some naked photographs of city officials the government doesn't want you to see. Click here or here:



The legendary sunken subdivision of Atlantis Acres Estates: Given that there's nothing I love more than a good foreclosure auction, I might just have to move to Johnson County. If there's one thing I've learned from columnists at The Kansas City Star, you don't actually have to live in Kansas City in order to write about it -- in fact, it's probably best to have some narrative and geographic distance. Like Ernest Hemingway writing about his World War I experiences in Paris cafes and Mike Hendricks covering Mayor Mark Funkhouser from the 119th Street Cheesecake Factory, I think I could best assemble Photoshop comics and snotty blurbs from the comfort of a leather recliner in the family room of a suburban crackerbox McMansion picked up cheap from a failing mortgage lender. Oh, anyway, foreclosures are wuh-hay up in Johnson and Wyandotte counties compared to a national trend. That was the whole "news hook" that got me started, here.

Harry Shearer's show ain't no Christmas present, either: Revenues have declined at National Public Radio as a result of the econocalyptic climate, the same as every other organization in the country except Hormel, the Campbell's Soup company and Trans/Global Hobo Bindles Solutions Worldwide SKG. So they're cutting 64 jobs, and -- more significantly -- actually canceling two shows, which NPR has never, ever done in their entire "Herstory." But then I actually sort of lost interest in the whole thing when I read that neither of the two canceled shows were the hateful A Prairie Home Companion or completely flaccid Whadd'ya Know? In fact, I've never heard of either one of the shows they did cancel, so I'll just assume Day to Day and News and Notes were mid-day continuations of the monotonous droning sound of Morning Edition. But I like to think that the actual cancellation of two NPR programs had to come as a jolting wake-up call to heartbeat-with-eyes Garrison Keillor, who had probably never even considered the possibility that his job-for-life might come to an end before he'd actually assumed room temperature. Chris Packham's dickishness about National Public Radio is underwritten by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, ADM: Supermarket to the World and listeners like you.

-- Chris Packham