Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
Author: Teen diarist Terri, a student at St. Thomas Aquinas
Date: 1972
Discovered at: Unsorted box buried deep in a Westport estate-sale basement
The Cover Promises: "1/2 Frosh Year + Soph Summer"
Representative Quote:
"Now I have $5.10, enough to buy a pair of earrings and Super Sheer. Well, this week has been cold and exciting because I wondered all week if I had a boyfriend or not." (January 18)
Your Crap Archivist admits that he has on occasion picked through the private journals of young girls. That said, my privacy-invading has never before sunk me as low as it did a couple weeks back when, on my knees in a mildewed basement, I found myself jimmying the lock of a Catholic school girl's diary. Turns out, Jimmying isn't my thing. The lock popped off, and this chilling message greeted me from inside the diary's cover:
"No one if I can help it will never flip through the preceding pages."
The author continues in this vein:
"I will never quote what is in the preceding pages to anyone NEVER."
This huge media whore in Kansas just announced the protest of Lady Gaga's sold out Jan. 7 show in St. Louis. Wow. What a shock.
News like this presents a problem. On the one hand, He Who Shall Not Be Named doesn't deserve the attention he so obviously craves by making grand and vicious proclamations about any flavor of the month he thinks will get him in the headlines. On the other hand, if you do have tickets to this show, you deserve advance warning this dude and his clan of desperate, sad people will probably be parading out front. Treat them as you would a total eclipse of the sun and just don't look.
Police have identified Dwight Gibson, 37, as the man who was shot to death in last night's incident on the 5900 block of Cypress Place.
Another man believed to be involved in the shooting was treated for a gunshot wound. His identity has not been released.
No suspects have been charged in connection with the crime. Police are asking anyone with information to call the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-TIPS.
| Start 2010 with a bowl of steaming tripe! |
The right way to start the New Year is to wake up early enough to eat a hearty breakfast loaded with foods legendary for their curative powers. Like menudo, the spicy Mexican tripe soup with chili peppers and hominy (there's often a calf's foot in there too, but not a handful of cute singing teenage boys). Poco's on the Boulevard, which re-opened as a Mexican buffet in September (although owner Lorenza "Poco" Guiterrrez continues to serve from the menu too, including those good old Waids-style malted waffles) will be open on New Year's Day, offering a big vat of fiery menudo on the breakfast buffet.
Waffles may not be the ultimate hangover-relief breakfast unless they're blanketed with butter. The secret, you see, is the grease. A breakfast rich in butter and bacon fat is a sure-fire way to stabilize the head-clanging dizziness of the morning after. If you're thinking of the venerable Village Inn, you can follow up a cholesterol-laden cheese omelette, buttered toast, bacon and sausage with a hefty slab of Caramel Pecan Silk Supreme Pie. It's open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. -- so go ahead, sleep in, eat later!
In the early morning hours on Sept. 30, 2009, SWAT teams readied themselves to kick in the front doors of some of the city's worst drug houses.
On their heels were a cadre of detectives from the Kansas City Police Department and lawmen from six federal agencies. At the SWAT team's all-clear, they were prepared to storm in and serve the pile of arrest warrants they'd amassed since January.
It was the beginning of a three-day violent crime sweep, one of KCPD's new tools in the fight against the city's murder rate.
By early fall of this year, 89 people had died violently within the city limits, according to KCPD records. Since then, police have slowed -- but not stopped -- the flow of homicides: 21 more people have been killed since that morning in late September. As of today, 2009 ends with 13 percent fewer killings than last year -- but still a 17 percent increase over 2007.
KCPD brass hatched the plan in August 2008 -- right around the time The Pitch took on the Killa City project. Summertime violence had escalated into a blood bath, primarily on the east side. With 22 homicides -- nearly one per day -- it was the single deadliest month in a decade. Four months later, a two-day sweep, the first of its kid, netted 108 arrests on 138 warrants.
View KCPD Violent Crime Sweep zones in a larger map
| Diana Monarrez is a hostess with the mostest |
"The host or hostess immediately sets the tone for the entire evening," says my friend Truman, a 25-year veteran of the restaurant business. "If you step into a restaurant and you're not immediately greeted warmly by the person at the front desk or -- even worse -- met with a frosty reception or haughtiness, your mood is soured right away. It can take a good server the rest of the night to turn that perception around."
A friend of mine who recently took a second job working as a host in one of the Plaza's busiest dining venues was stunned by what he's learned working behind the hostess desk. He assumed the job would be relatively simple. You greet guests and show them to their tables, right?
For those of you unfamiliar with the Reverend Dwight Frizzell, he's the front man for long-running world-beat crazies Black Crack Revue. Prior to BCR's formation in the early '80s, he recorded the album Beyond the Black Crack, which is crazy rare and obscure.
It's regarded as "a pre-cursor to the mayhem of the Sun City Girls and Nurse With Wound," and it's a tape-splicing bit of insanity. If you can handle the idea of Sun Ra and Negativland playing simultaneously on two stereos on opposite sides of the room, while you sit in between them, tweaked to the gills on cough syrup (daytime and nighttime), then you should be good to listen to this.
Everyone else might want to take a moment.
You can get the whole story over at Paradigm Discs.
BCR is also playing shows down at the new R Bar on Genessee.
Throwback MP3 of the Week: Anal Magic & Rev. Dwight Frizzell, "Black crack and the sole survivors"
The top 25 Billboard hits of 2009, mashed, cut, and otherwise messed the hell up in just under five minutes. Nice job there, DJ Earworm. The list of all the songs is after the jump, but you can always try and guess.
Although, really -- I only knew about half. Why? Because I write about music on the Internet, and live in comic shops and record stores. My awareness of what's popular amongst the hoi polloi is limited to what I hear in gas stations and coming out of my kids' rooms.
MP3: DJ Earworm, "United States of Pop 2009 (Blame It On the Pop)"
Yea he could have been a white meth head but he was just a black…
MCI is freaking awesome. Its quick and easy. THATS ALL YOU NEED IN AN AIRPORT!!!
Yummies! Great smoked BBQ ribs. Ate lunch there hours ago and I'm still full... And…
Had lunch there today, amazing smoked ribs. Hours later, I'm still full, but still want…
Reallly!?!? No mention of Hopfest???
Cody Rhodes keeps his family's tradition alive on WWE's Monday Night Raw
The Pitch's Taste of KC is ready for eaters this Sunday
Big Rip Brewing Co. opens to the world Sunday
The Humdinger: Stand in line to get in, baby
Jim Gaffigan, Dad Is Fat author, on his way to our fat town
KC Pride Festival 2013? Yes, it's still on
Kansas City SmokeShack BBQ has things smoking on Swift
D'Bronx corned-beef sandwich is a deli stopgap