Seperated At Birth

This is the Mayor of Kansas City, MO, Mark Funkhouser.


This is my Great, Great, Grandfather, Andrew Blackbourn.



I'm not even joking. Creepy.

You can thank this one for pointing this out to me.

A Post Of Biblical Proportions

Yesterday on Talk of the Nation they talked with illustrator R. Crumb about his latest book: "The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb".


For those of you too young to remember R. Crumb, let me give you a quick Primer.

Keep On Truckin'!

Mr. Natural


The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers


"Fritz the Cat"



If you were a stoner in the early '70's (and everyone was), you remember R. Crumb's illustrations in various underground comics for sale in the head shops of the day. Like Temple Slug.

They used to sell a lot more than flip 'n fucks and incense!

R. Crumb recently took on a 4 year project to illustrate the entire Book of Genesis.


He made a conscious decision to illustrate the text as is. No interpretation, no mockery, no editing. Just a straight-forward illustration assignment.




He even illustrated each and every begat. I'm really looking forward to getting a copy of this.

And now for something entirely different.

Ever wonder where God was on 9/11?

If you believe in an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Supreme Being, or Greater Power, or any sort of Guiding Force of The Universe,you surely must have asked yourself, "What page of the Divine Plan were we on THAT day?"

Mr. Deity and his Executive Admin Larry have the answer.



Thanks to my buddy Kanga for the heads up!

Culinary Serendipity

This afternoon I'm taking GTO's friend home and taking GTO back to her mom.

Afterwards, I swing by Blockbuster to return the Halloween Party movies I rented for them:

Hot Rod
Orphan
Step Brothers
The latest Friday the 13th

I had bought about $18 worth of Halloween candy and we only had 1 Trick or Treater, so I had a lot of left over sugar and calories that needed to go away.

I drove to the River Market and donated the candy to the Smiles Change Lives Candy Exchange. Except I didn't exchange it for anything, I just dumped it and ran away.

As I enjoyed the beautiful 75 degree November 1st (thanks to the AWESOME global warming...I still have my windows open!), I meandered my way back home via the most scenic routes (Independence Avenue) possible.

On a wild hair, I decided to grab some lunch at a place I had driven by many times. Clem's on 23rd St. in Independence.


I love checking out these ancient, local diners that have been around for 50-60 years.

As a rule, they never update their menu, they never change the way they do things, they just hunker down, crank out the grub and survive.

I've never been to Clem's before so I don't know the drill. The place is TINY. There is only one other car in he lot when I pull in. While I am assessing the situation, my first question is resolved when a curly-headed youngster carrying a pen and a pad comes out to my jeep to take my order.

This method of food service dates back to the Late Pleistocene when Wooly Rhinoceros ribs were popular fare.

He didn't bring a menu with him and there wasn't much of one posted outside.


So I just ordered a cheeseburger, fries and coke. Because every 50 year old diner serves that, right?

The waiter/carhop guy doesn't blink an eye or say anything other than he will have it out to me in a couple of minutes. Then he asks if I'd like that as a "combo" as it will save me about a buck. Channeling the most frugal person I know, I say "sure".

When he arrives with my grease stained paper sack full of food, the first thing I notice are the fries.


They assume that if you are coming to Clem's you either don't have a weight/blood pressure problem or you just don't give a flying fuck.

Plump, hot, moist and salty with a teasing hint of skin. The same way I like my women!

Definitely not dry, sterile and health conscience canola or peanut oil fries. I think these fuckers were fried in delicious LARD! These are the kind of french fries fast food places used to served before whiney Johnson County bitches started complaining about the size of their asses.

These days, I normally eat as few fries as possible. If there are fries left over after the last bite of burger, I pitch them as useless calories. But I found myself munching these tasty motherfuckers LONG after the sandwich was gone.

Speaking of the sandwich....

It was a goddamn guerilla Maid-Right!


It was a fucking loose meat cheeseburger, served without warning!

Now, I can't tell you if it was a good loose meat sandwich or a bad one. It's been so long since I've had a loose meat sandwich on purpose that I don't have a frame of reference to give you a comparison.

In all honesty, if I had known that Clem's only dished up loose meat sandwiches when you ordered a cheeseburger from jewfro boy I probably wouldn't have stopped there because it wasn't what I was looking for.

But the serendipity of the experience was notable enough to post about if only for the fact that I know that there are loose meat sandwich aficianados who are always searching for the elusive diners who still serve them.

So this is for you, loose meat fans! Add Clem's to your sloppy arsenal!

A Huge First

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that last night was a big night for me.

If you don't follow me on Twitter, well, I don't blame ya. I probably wouldn't follow me either. But I digress.

Last night was the first time I met my only daughter's boyfriend.

This was the scenario. My daughter, young (15 y.o.) Galadriel Tanqueray Onassis, her friend Chrissy, my daughter's boyfriend Johnny and his friend Jerry, were coming to my house on Halloween to watch movies while I fixed tacos for dinner.

All in all, the evening went very well.

Johnny seems about as harmless as any 16 year old boy with a driver's license, guaged ears, a crooked hat, who plays guitar in a band (but can't name The Beatles), and who is sitting in my living room on my couch with his arm draped around my daughter's shoulders with his left hand dangling dangerously close to where it shouldn't be dangling.

Which is to say NOT VERY FUCKING HARMLESS AT ALL!!!

Actually, I think I handled things as well as can be expected. I didn't embarrass her (too much) despite making many unannounced and random trips downstairs to an incrementally less illuminated living room.

There are more lights on downstairs when I'm asleep then there were while they were watching movies!

Still, the boys left by 11 and the girls spent the night here.

This morning I got word that Johnny and Jerry think I'm funny and my tacos were delicious. Which GTO of course hates. All of her friends think I'm cool and funny and she can't stand that. Which amuses me greatly.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not stupid.

Are my daughter and I best friends? Absolutely.

Have I relinquished my roll as a Parent? Oh hellz no!

What I have been doing for the past 15 years is cultivating a relationship of openess. I want her to know that we can talk about ANYTHING without me having some melodramatic meltdown.

Because in that environment, when I DO have to throw down the Father Card and say "that's not going to happen and this is why", I have a lot more credibility and she takes me much more seriously.

It's my theory of Gravitational Parenting.

It's not very well thought out, it has absolutely no grounding in science and it has never been proven to work because I'm just making this shit up as I go along like everybody else.

But so far, so good.

TWA Overhaul Base Closing

That's right. I said the TWA Overhaul Base. I was never able to accept the American Airlines thing.

My dad worked at the TWA Overhaul Base for over 20 years before retiring. He would come home from his twighlight shift wearing those overalls and smelling of jet fuel and cold weather.

When I was born, he was a sheet metal worker for the Continental Can Company in Coffeyville, KS.

From there, he got a job at the Boeing Overhaul Base in Wichita working on the B-52 Stratofortress.


In 1964 he landed at the TWA Overhaul Base in Kansas City and worked there until he retired.

TWA still had a major corporate presence in Kansas City in those days.


They still had Lockheed Super Constellations in their fleet.


Beautiful fucking airplane! The most graceful bird to ever fly. I remeber seeing them in the sky, still full of passengers.


Back when passengers dressed up to fly somewhere because it was still a special occasion and you were pampered like you were aboard a flying cruise ship.


I remember when TWA finally retired the Constellations and coverted to an all-jet fleet in 1967. It was a big deal. They had a big open house at the Overhaul base for employees and their families.

Just like they did a couple of years later when they bought their first 747's.


And in 1984 when the Space Shuttle prototype Enterprise made a stop at the TWA Overhaul base perched atop its 747 carrier vehicle.



I don't care if they find someone else to lease the property as an Olympic training facility or a Mega Flea Market. It will always be the TWA Overhaul Base to me.

An Untold Story Chapter 4 - The End

Becky hadn't been returning my emails over the last few weeks because she wasn't getting them.

She was spending most of her time in the hospital, fighting for her life.

The Interferon treatments she was taking to destroy the Hep C were making her so sick and causing so much collateral damage to her body that her doctors took her off the treatments and spent 5 weeks just trying to bring her back to relative health.

The worst part of all of this was, the treatments didn't work.

After all she had been through over the last 10 months, she still had the Hep C.

It was incurable, it would keep attacking her liver until she got sick enough to get on a transplant list. That's what she had to look forward to.

But wait...it actually DOES get worse.

Part of the collateral damage that the toxic cocktail of treatments caused was to change her brain chemistry.

She had now been diagnosed as being bi-polar. Long term side effect.

She was going to counseling for depression.

She didn't want to take any meds for the bi-polar because of her experience taking meds for the Hep C. She didn't trust them. She's looking at natural, holistic approaches.

She says she'll come over to see me.

Much to my surprise, I wasn't entirely sure how I feel about that.

I mean, I hadn't seen her since sometime in April or May. It was now late September. At that point, I honestly didn't know what I wanted to happen. I loved her, I missed her, I still wanted us to be together. I think. But there had been so much time and distance between us. I'm not sure how you recover from that.

So she comes over

We sit and talk and everything seems...oddly normal.

We snuggle on the couch, we talk, we get caught up. I tell her I love her, she tells me she loves me.

She's devastated to realize that she completely missed my birthday. She says "You realize that with everything going on I would have missed my own birthday?" I laughed and reassured her that I understand, it's OK, no big deal.

She says she still doesn't have a phone and probably won't get one for another couple of months. She has some seemingly rational reasons for this.

We promise we'll try to do a better job of staying in touch and communicating.

We hug and kiss goodbye, and she leaves. I feel so much better! It feels like we might actually make it through this.

That was the last time I ever saw her or spoke to her.

She never returned another email.

Not even when I offered to take her out for her 50th birthday.

Obviously, she had been pushing me away for months and I just wasn't getting it. I thought we just needed to communicate better. But in retrospect, she had been communicating very clearly for a long time. I was just too stupid to realize it.

I still think about her almost every day. I wonder if she is OK. I wonder if she's on a transplant list. I wonder if she's even still alive. I have no way of knowing.

I suppose I could have made some Grand Dramatic Gesture to try to resolve things, but all of those options seemed kind of "over the top" and border-line stalkerish.

She clearly didn't need or want me in her life any more. That's her call.

I've never been one to "fight" for a relationship. If both people aren't in the relationship, then there's no relationship to fight for.

But some closure would have been nice.

I've been in a LOT of relationships and all of them eventually ended. I believe that all relationships have a natural lifespan. Nothing lasts forever. But I've always known how and when the relationships ended.

"Hey, XO. I've never mentioned this before, but you're kinda of a douchey fucking bastard with a tiny dick and I don't really like you. Never have. I'm outta here."

"XO, I don't know how to tell you this, so I'll just come right out with it. I've met someone else. We're in love. I'm sorry. Goodbye."

"Hey buddy, it's been fun, but I'm done. Thanks for all the fucks. See ya, wouldn't wanta be ya!"

But I've never had a relationship that just...evaporated.

When you are in the middle of emotional dynamics like that, it's more difficult than you might think to look at things objectively as a disinterested, outside observer might see things.

If you leave an open container of water sitting on the counter, that water is going to evaporate and eventually that container will be empty.

You can't actually see the water evaporating. The day to day change in the container is barely noticeable, yet the end is inevitable.

Emptiness.

A once full vessel that held so much promise, is now inexplicably empty, coated with the dusty residue of what once was.

Political Bloggers Crack Me Up!

Don't get me wrong.

Anybody can blog or text or tweet or write or say anything they want about politics. I do it all the fucking time. That's pretty much the foundation of Free Speech in this country.

What amuses me to no end are Political Bloggers who are, at best, big fish in a little pond who think they have a "voice that matters".

They fancy themselves to be local Hannity's or Olberman's.

They want to have an influence. They want to be a player. They like to think that when they speak, local politicians QUAKE IN FEAR!

They want to parlay their blog into a power center that can shift the political debate to forward their own agenda. They want to "matter" so much that the stench of their ambition scorches the nostrils.

Con men have always been successful because they know they can rely on their victim's greed to obscure their fraud. The victim wants the payoff SO BAD, they are willing to believe just about anything.

Political bloggers are just as gullible.

Once they get enough traffic to attract attention, the political con men move in. They get close to the blogger. They share "insider information". They make the blogger feel like they are privy to information known only to an inner circle of powerful and influential movers and shakers.

"Pssst! Hey buddy! I got some news for ya! Nobody else in town has this. I'm giving it to you. This is an exclusive! You can't fact check it because nobody knows it but you and me (...and you're not a journalist and wouldn't know how to fact check a sunny day...) and even if they did, they would just deny it. You gotta trust me! This is some heavy shit! The public has a right to know!"

The blogger, excited that they are starting to develop their own exclusive network of informants and tipsters, publishes the material.

The blogger has now become the meat puppet of any political hack who wants to advance an agenda.

They know who the liberals are. They know who the conservatives are. They know who the loose cannons are. They will use any available tool who allows themselves to be used.

The biggest political bloggers in this town are nothing more than gullible marks for professional politicos who are WAY smarter and WAY more manipulative than the naive and ambitious hacks who think their voice actually matters to anyone but them.

They are laughable buffoons with egos even bigger than my prostrate and the REAL "movers and shakers" view them with ridicule and contempt.