Anne Winter, R.I.P.

Virtually everyone that cares already knows this, but Anne Winter died recently. She owned a wonderful record store-Todd and I stole a lot of ideas from Recycled Sounds when we opened Elf's Head. When she closed, that was it for record stores in Kansas City.

I didn't know her well, just enough to say hello on the rare times we ran into each other. Best wishes to her family and close friends.

St. Makarios the Roman

From a 17th Century tempera painting on wood, from Skete of St. Anne on Mount Athos. Fabulous stuff.

Graves & Goth

The reliable Travis Fox has posted a cartoon in the Pitch reminding everyone that Sam Graves generously opened the doors to the Treasury so that some fools in Blue Springs could blow through some taxpayer dollars wanting to eradicate their goth crime problem.

Graves is one of the most powerless Members of Congress now since he's in the minority but he had little power even under Bush. He couldn't even keep the White House from firing his brother as U.S. Attorney.

Read the story: http://www.rickross.com/reference/goth/goth4.html

And I should put in a link to where Fox (and others) post their work: http://comicstripjoint.blogspot.com/

First of seven

A project. I came across this semi-deposition thing some months ago. I'm guessing it's part of a divorce case and the wife is trying to get some confirmation on some bad conduct by her husband via a third party. I think the third party is a daughter-in-law who moved in with her infant son. It's not clear where her husband was other than he vamoosed. Interesting that she went for help to his parents and not her family. I'm partly sorry we don't have the answers but it is fun to imagine just what the answers were ...

This is the first of seven scans-it was on legal paper, so I had to scan in just part of each page. Read and enjoy.

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

Now I remember ...

I was going to post this series of scans in this document I found except that I got sidetracked and didn't actually do the scans. That's corrected. Because the way most people will read this will be most recent to oldest, it makes sense for me to put the last part up first, so you can read it in order. This'll be #7 and last.

Trip #2

to my brother's in D.C. for our annual visit to Baltimore to see the Royals. When going to Camden Yards, it's best to eat outside-there's a stand across the street that serves a decent and decently priced crabcake. The BBQ out near the warehouse is adequate but not as good as what I'd get in KC. All credit to whoever picks the music in Baltimore-this year, I heard The Replacements and Siouxisie and the Banshees. And credit to the concession staff, who offered me a free funnel cake that was left over after the game. I said no-didn't think I could survive the trip back if I did.

Next year, the Royals play in Washington vs. the Nats, so we'll do that instead.

The pic's from Petra, not Baltimore or Washington. Shame, because it'd be cool.

So ...

what was I doing when not updating? Working on making the music business safe for musicians, taking a couple of short vacations. To where?

The first was a one-way flight to St. Petersburg, where I used to live and own part of a record store. Went to the old neighborhood, visited the block where the store was located. For all the money St. Pete's spent on the waterfront, you go five blocks inland from there and it's desolate. The 600 block of Central is just brutal. The block where the store was looks pretty much the same other than the empty storefronts. The geriatric drugstore's closed, the old man's clothing store is closed. Drove back via Atlanta (stopping to visit friends) and visited Unclaimed Baggage, which I endorse. Then did Atlanta/KC in one really long day (made longer by me deciding to drive the southern route). The pic is just a very old one of me.

Finally

No excuse at all, but back we are, updating. Here's a pic of an old can that sure makes me hungry.

You have to admire someone who knows what he needs

Note headlline. They don't need a good real estate lawyer or even a mediocre one. Or just bad. Only a real bad one will do. And not just an attorney, but an attorny.

Irina Demick

Watched "The Longest Day" again recently. I showed enough motivation to find out the identity of the actress who played a member of the Resistance-Irina Demick. So now you know.

American Housing Prices

A chart using data from Prof. Robert Shiller regarding U.S. housing prices. Note how the inflation-adjusted home price operated a ceiling of $150,000. Then came the bubble. I wouldn't count on housing to stabilize until that price drops below $150,ooo and probably well below that.

mlb.com stinks

As you can see from the screengrab above, I use Firefox. When I go to mlb.com and want to look at a baseball box score, here's what I get. I don't know if Microsoft is paying MLB to do this bad web design or if this just comes natural. It can't be that hard to make something simple like a box score actually show up on a webpage.

The Indian in the Test Pattern

Another image of youth-the test pattern shown when the station wasn't broadcasting. This would be prior to infomercials. I always wondered why the guy at the top of the pattern. I did some looking and discovered this was created in New Jersey in 1939. But no idea why the chief at the top.

Evil Clowns

I feel awful that I can't come up with credit for the source on this-someone send me a link and I copied the pic, then forgot to note the source. But one day ... this is from the 20's. Evil clowns living in Washington D.C. Could be Teapot Dome ... reminds me of the late, great Evil Clown record store in Chicago. Always found something I wanted in there, even though it was frequently priced high. There used to be a lot of very fine record stores in that part of Chicago but now most have closed.

R.I.P. Lux Interior

Sad news that I won't see The Cramps again. Always enjoyable and when I had my old "Bad Music For Bad People" shirt, I enjoyed the strange looks it got.

Hansborough Indoor Stadium

Carolina's win last night over Duke made Tyler Hansborough and Danny Green 4-0 lifetime at Duke's arena. Can't do any better than that and while I try to avoid public celebrations of wins due to the inevitable time Carolina loses a big game, this is a feat worth recognizing. Not sure who's responsible for the 'shop here but thanks.

Von der Tann

When I'm getting the daily walk in English Landing Park, I've got something or another on my .mp3 player. Right now it's Robert Massie's excellent Castles of Steel, the story of the British/German naval war in World War I. The narrator does a fine job and one of the things I like is his pronunciation of the name of the German battlecruiser Von der Tann. Seems to have been a fine ship and as lethal as hoped by its designers. Picture courtesy of Wikipedia.

Cats

I've got two cats here. Weasel, the gray one, is a shelter rescue and Whisper, a stray rescue by my friend Todd Foltz. While they do like to wrestle over who gets the top of their new handmade cat perch, they get along very well and nap together. The first pic is them sleeping, the second is after they woke up after the flash. Weasel's slightly annoyed, Whisper is cleaning her paw.

More Onion

Sort of tying the recent subjects together, the Onion combines Obama and Conan to very funny results. As someone who read all Howard's Conan books when much younger, I approve.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/92901

An Onion Pic

This was in The Onion a long time ago. Link: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_to_re_hang_saddam_hussein

Yeah, it's old but I still laugh.

More Comic Fun

Here we are, one of the worst movies ever, from the category of they didn't mean it to stink. This is from the comic book. He sure looks like a Mongol, eh?

W.C. Fields

Only I would make this connection. A friend sent a youtube link showing some ball tricks by Kaka. Good stuff but it reminded me of W. C. Fields' juggling. It's worth watching.

The Vikings

Instead of making movies out of comic books, they used to make comic books out of movies. This is for one of the worst movies ever, The Vikings, starring those clearly Nordic gentlemen Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine. There's also a comic book for The Conqueror, another of the worst movies ever. I've got a pic of that and will upload soon.

Radah Cox

My grandmother was a teacher-at the time in Kansas, teachers couldn't be married. I believe this was from when she was teaching in Overland Park, probably Overland Park Elementary. She's in the front row, third from the left. This would have been taken in the late '20s.

How About One For The Horse?

WWI cavalryman, complete with spear. Or lance, I suppose. I don't know what army this guy was in but it seems weird to me that he's dressed up in his gas mask but his horse isn't. So if you ride off into a gas attack by the enemy, odds don't favor the horse. Not that I've ever seen a gas mask for a horse.

Useful Advice

Don't know the source, but it's a smart move to print this and have it someplace where it's available for quick reference.

Back-Abdullah the Butcher

Yeah, it's been seven months. Been busy but I actually received an email about something here and realized that maybe there's a reader or two. So ... back during the campaign, what with all that X the Whatever stuff, I was terribly unhappy that I never heard the GOP candidates mention Abdullah the Butcher. Maybe it's because he was born in Canada.

Anyway, through the fabulous market that is eBay, I bought the autograph that you see in the pic. I especially like the "Mr." part although I think it'd be even better as "Mr. Abdullah T. Butcher".