Something is changing, though. You can feel it on the streets. You can see it in the faces. Or just, y’know, huff some of it from the dirty jar containing this assy-smelling Midwest Voices commentary by Hampton Stevens, a KC-based writer for The Atlantic and ESPN the Magazine.

Frankly, considering the origins of Midwest Voices as a kind of “volunteer fire department” model for the future of journalism, those are some pretty impressive professional credentials. I mean, compared with the boring housewives and Wikipedia plagiarists they used to publish.

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• Cynthia Davis just wants what's straightest for the children.

In this week's update from soon-to-be-former state Rep. Cynthia Davis, the O'Fallon Loon takes on the most sinister kind of gayhood: gay parenting. Repeatedly referring to homosexual relationships as "tragedies," Davis writes that children have a right to non-gay parents.

The Loon remarks that no matter how hard they try, gay parents can only aspire to be "very good friends" with their impostor children. If they didn't squeeze the child out of their bodies or if they weren't married to someone who did, it doesn't count:

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• There once was a man from Platte City, who thought baring his dick might be pretty.

A furtive glance from across the room. A candlelit dinner with R. Kelly's "Bump 'N Grind" playing softly in the background. A negative Chlamydia test printout. These things get women in the baby-makin' mood.

Notice how I didn't include whipping out your man meat to display to the lady of your desire. Although it's already been proven that this move does not work for Kansas City men, Alderman Charles Cook of Platte City gave it a shot anyway.

The campaign to recall oversize novelty Mayor Mark Funkhouser turned in 13,000 new signatures to the city clerk yesterday. Apparently, the city clerk has to work on holidays, probably because some bitch supervisor keeps denying her vacation requests. Anyway, those signatures are on top of 7,400 valid signatures turned in earlier this month, so things look statistically grim for Big & Tall embarrassment M. Funkhouser and his magnificent First Lady G. Squitiro. Funkhouser tells KMBC Channel 9 "If anything, I haven't fought hard enough. I haven't been aggressive enough. I'm only going to ramp it up." Pretty tough talk! On the other hand, while he's getting all aggro about the recall, he has managed to build a consensus of people who basically hate his administration. As Tony's Kansas City points out this morning, there weren't a whole lot of groups out there pushing back against the recall effort this time around.

As I learned from Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, one single counter-factual slip-up can mean the difference between a successful triple murder and a long stretch in jail -- or a long stretch in "gaol," as they call it in the cheeky British version of Encyclopedia Brown, "Encyclopædia Browne." That's why it's so important for triple murderers like Bugs Meany to know that the Hindenberg was not full of "explosive helium" and that heavy objects don't fall faster than lighter objects. So when Gloria Squitiro tells The New York Times, wrongly, that her expulsion from City Hall by the city council was because "The establishment saw a formidable team... and they wanted to break it up," the inescapable conclusion is that GLORIA SQUITIRO IS GUILTY OF MURDER! How did Encyclopædia Browne know??? (Turn your monitor upside down for the answer).

˙sʇuıɐldɯoɔ ˙ɔ˙o˙ǝ˙ǝ ɹoɟ ʞsıɹ ʇɐ ʎʇıɔ ǝɥʇ ʇnd sǝnssı loɹʇuoɔ ǝslndɯı ɹǝɥ ǝsnɐɔǝq llɐɥ ʎʇıɔ ɯoɹɟ pǝɹɹɐq sɐʍ oɹıʇınbs ɐıɹolƃ ʇɐɥʇ sʍouʞ ǝuʍoɹq ɐıpǝɐdolɔʎɔuǝ

"Meth lab" is no longer an acceptable punchline for a joke. So this federal grand jury has indicted 22 area residents for alleged involvement with the theft of $22 million of allergy medicine, an important chemical constituent for meth labs, the moonshine stills of the 21st century. The Roscoe P. Coltraines who made the arrests, probably by cutting off Coy and Vance Duke before they could reach the county line in their racist muscle car, were probably just trying to help Boss Hogg get the deed to the Duke family farm. Here is a picture of Coy and Vance Duke shirtless:

You know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes brass balls to sell real estate: Some city council members are on-board with this whole awesome 1,000-room downtown hotel plan. Maybe they really love "staycations," a douchetarded portmanteau generated by untalented travel writers to describe a phenomenon that sounds like it should be happening but actually isn't. The Kansas City Convention & Visitors Association says Kansas City has lost $4 billions of dollars to rivals like Denver and bitch-ass Indianapolis by not having a hotel close to a convention center, which is a lot of money whether you look at it as 4,000,000,000 one-dollar bills, or just one big oversized novelty check for $4 billion. You could really walk around feeling like a big-shot with that thing. Anyway. I WONDER HOW KANSAS CITY WILL PAY FOR SUCH A HOTEL. That's non-rhetorical, you guys, can you solve this mystery? The first person to respond with the correct answer, "tax-exempt bonds," wins this beautiful collectible porcelain bisque figurine of the late G.G. Allin, a precious heirloom your family will treasure forever:

GET THEM TO SIGN ON THE LINE THAT IS DOTTED: The 2009 performance of the Actors Theatre is David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, so I'll take this opportunity to reiterate that if someone mounted a production of this play starring talented 8-year-old children, and tickets to the performance cost $1,000 each, I would sell a whole lot of my stuff in order to attend opening night. My only stipulation is that the production has to use the revised 1992 version of the script produced for the film version, which added Alec Baldwin's character Blake. In fact, if somebody could just videotape their 8-year-old kid performing that one scene and put it up on YouTube, I'd be happy:

WEDNESDAY ADORABLE PICTURES OF THE DAY:

A little kid visiting the White House wanted to know if President Barack Obama's haircut felt like his own. So Obama bent over and let the kid pat his head. SO ADORABLE! And this is absolutely going to slay my coworker Nadia. When she gets distracted by this photo and starts making the "precious cooing" noises she always makes over the President, I'm going to snatch her wallet out of her purse. When she gets to the end of this sentence, it's already TOO LATE.

IT'S A BABY DAMN ELEPHANT! This baby damn elephant fucking owns you, motherfuckers. SO FUCKING CUTE. He was born in Antwerp on Sunday. Nadia wasn't carrying any cash today, but I think I can sell her Social Security card.

Your Pocketbook and YOU, oh, haha, you carry a "pocketbook": The Senate passed some new credit card legislation that protects consumers from, let's say, themselves. I really don't feel like going into the details today, unless those details are completely made up. Consumers were asking for all the abuse the banks administered and I don't have any sympathy or, according to the DSM IV, feelings of empathy, remorse, or regard for the safety of others. I have a condition.

Basically, if you filled out the pre-approved application during the salad days when credit was cheap and delicious pork sandwiches hung heavy on the vine, and now you're upset that your credit card company has made its due dates into a moving target, try to focus on the fact that you specifically asked for the interest-rate-based abuse they're heaping on you and your bank account, and there is no "safeword" for this particular BDSM financial arrangement. ATTENTION LADIES: I'm debt free, plus I can palm a basketball, if you know what I'm saying (with my right hand, my left one is malformed and tiny, like a doll's hand. But still).

The Kansas City Star has this timely business article on the slow death of the independent bookstore. Timely, because I finally got all my various payday loans and car title loans paid off, thanks to God and the Amazon Kindle. With my new clean slate and slightly better credit rating, I'm planning to take out a loan for a huge truck. The dealer says I'll be able to make the payments easy, so I'm not too worried about that whole thing. Like the free second Snuggie that comes with your order of the first Snuggie, paying off that rapidly accumulating debt and getting approved for a Ford F-250 also came with the free bonus of winning a bet with Justin Kendall and Peter Rugg.

Google News was down this morning. AGAIN. My early-morning work-flow is so firmly established at this point that instead of writing Daily Briefs, I left some trouble-maker comments on The Kansas City Star's Midwest Voices blog.

A Midwest Voices blogger named Grant Martin wrote about his mortgage troubles, which I can totally almost relate to:

Midwest Voices blogger Erni Meade posted an entry expressing horror over a Barry Road bicycle lane.

Finally, hippie socialist and Kansas City Star columnist E. Thomas McClanahan took a few minutes from his busy schedule of advocating for the legalization of marijuana to say some unflattering things about Nancy Pelosi, which you can read here. I totally agreed with E. Tom:

In space, no one can hear you bitch: The only people allowed to go into space are extraordinarily rich people like Mark Cuban who can actually pay Russians to launch them into orbit, or the astronauts in government space programs, who are qualified via a lot of fancy, rarefied knowledge such as how to fly jets and how to fuse four protons into one single alpha particle. Fat, farty-smelling old Earth-bound you and handsome, Aqua-Velva-scented me will never have the opportunity to escape the gravity well because we're all too busy with our shards of mastodon bones scraping survival incomes from the hides of the telemarketing companies we work for.

But it's axiomatic that everyone wants to bitch about their work, no matter how insanely priveleged they are. Get KMBC Channel 9 sports anchor Len Dawson alone for a beer, and he'll probably just gripe about all the prank phone calls he gets from prancing WDAF stallion Phil Witt and having to call the police twice a week to request Silver Alerts whenever Larry Moore wanders out of the building.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who should really SHUT UP, bitches like a small, bepigtailed girl to National Geographic about having to suck beverages from a straw in free-fall. "You feel like an insect sucking juices out of another insect," he says. Such are the horrible conditions on both the space shuttle and in any given McDonald's, a chain of Scottish restaurants I discovered recently on a trip. It's not like NASA is requiring astronauts in orbit to audit an entire quarter's worth of expense reports in one day because there's a regional vice president coming to the office in three days. That's your job. All Pettit has to do at work is have incredible adventures while sipping Tang through a straw. Anyway, Pettit invented a cup astronauts can use in space, which he did in space, Apollo 13-style, from available materials. The end. Although I intended to append a complaint about having to sit in a really uncomfortable chair while typing up descriptions of Phil Witt saying "Hey, Jerky," into the phone in his smooth, velvety news anchor voice. But who has time these days with all this damn straw-sucking we have to do?