Attractive, professionally dressed women don’t make it a habit to scoot past a half-dozen empty seats just to sit next to me at public meetings. So when one did so at the Johnson County Board of Commissioners Public Work Session on August 15, where opponents of the proposed Wonderful World of Oz theme park presented their comments, I did…
It took only a few minutes on June 29 for a rush of orange-brown mud that had gurgled up through a sidewalk at 26th and Madison to erupt into a geyser, showering the normally quiet street with concrete, mud, and rock. The plume inundated the front door of The Roasterie, a coffee roasting and distribution plant 30 feet away at…
The Harper case apparently isn’t the first time Victor Sabatino has stepped in to point out the wrongdoing of a bad Guy’s employee. Back in 1980, just after Borden Foods purchased Guy’s from founder Guy L. Caldwell, Sabatino was a plant manager, a Borden executive on the rise. Sabatino suspected that Guy’s newly hired personnel manager was stealing company funds….
“We challenge employees to get problems, as well as opportunities, out in the open, not swept under the rug.” — Victor Sabatino, in the April 1998 issue of SNACKWorld On the Ides of March, Victor Sabatino was at federal bankruptcy court in Kansas City, Missouri, explaining why his company, Guy’s Snack Foods, had gone broke this year. The meeting tested…
Judy rarely assumed the worst when it came to her daughter’s thoughts and actions. Theirs was a relationship built on mutual trust and respect. When Christina needed advice or a compassionate shoulder, Judy was always able to comfort her. If someone threatened Christina at school, Judy played bodyguard. Christina’s friends knew they could ask Judy for a ride to the…
Breakfast of champions: There’s a world of difference between a buffet like the Super Buffet (reviewed above), a cafeteria, and a Sunday brunch. The buffet concept, typically an all-you-can-eat restaurant where the customers serve themselves, is an idea that probably grew out of the old cafeteria concept. A bustling place like the Piccadilly Cafeteria (11741 Metcalf Avenue) still looks pretty…
Hey, look up there at 117th and Metcalf! It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it’s Super Buffet! It’s big, it’s loaded with food, and it has all the charm of a factory lunchroom. “It’s ugly,” sniffed my friend Judy, who wasn’t impressed by either the food or the decor. “It’s more VFW hall than Chinatown.” “No, it’s…
17 Thursday Giddyap! The 41st (this thing has been going on for a gol’darn long time) annual Abdallah Shrine Rodeo gallops into Kemper Arena today, where it will set up camp through Saturday. The Abdallah isn’t some ordinary rodeo; it’s part of the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association (PRCA), and these cattle-tackling, Brahman bull-riding, steer-wrestling cowgirls and -boys aren’t messing…
As it happens every leap year, we the people are being swept into the “Vote for me” vortex — like it or not — drawing us into a Ping-Pong match of speeches that can be both inspiring and discouraging. Democrats, Libertarians, Republicans, Reformists, Greens — both those who are registered and those who are not — are caught in the…
Friction Magazine’s Midtown Poetry Slam ain’t no poetry reading. It’s a word joust, a lyrical bout. If it were a poetical Celebrity Deathmatch, it’d be Tony Stanza versus Meg Rhymin’, a full-contact assault of expression. The poetry slam is a new form of creative sport in which participants get intellectually sweaty and face off, poet against poet, with only…
Somewhere between a ridge and a valley of the Smoky Mountains sits an expanse of earth called Land’s End. Its people are mostly poor and prone to trouble with the law. Think American Hollow, the Rory Kennedy documentary about an extended family of misfits and miscreants, and infuse what was already hard to believe with a shot of bitters….
Although there was a fair amount of diversity to be found among the acts that filled the 12-hour OZZfest with noisy rock, there were some common threads. For one thing, nearly every performer who took the stage addressed the issue of the 100-degree temperature by exclaiming, “It’s fucking hot!” For another, many the group proved that the influence of…
On the cover of their album Pioneers of the Intergalactic Frontier, The Silvermen appear as comic-book heroes whose look brings to mind the title of Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Space Cowboys. Clad in western garb and clear circular astronaut helmets and clutching guns, these artist’s renderings of The Silvermen seem prepared for attacks by bandits and martians alike. At The…
Originally, this Maximum Rock tour was supposed to be sort of a Monsters of Rock 2000, with Mötley Crüe and Megadeth taking up where Slayer and Metallica left off. But that was before thrash metal pioneers Anthrax got axed from this celebration of Reagan-era rock excess. “They really lit a spark under our ass every night,” Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx…
Although it has maintained its reputation as the most well-stocked punk haven, Epitaph has branched out in recent years, with either the parent label or its subsidiaries signing Tricky, Tom Waits, and Jamaican dancehall DJ Buju Banton. With his albums offering everything from African choral chants to acoustic ballads to bouncy dance tunes, the man born Mark Myrie has achieved…
Dangerous MindzFirst, Mi6 took a negative review from Pitch music critic Jeff Brown and turned the angst into a three-minute punk/pop gem that’s been the number-one song on Garageband.com for weeks. Now another local outfit has used such alleged player-hating from Pitch scribes as the impetus for a series of brutal freestyle rhymes at the recent sold-out Wu Tang Clan…
Those who tune in a few minutes before Al Gore’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention this week will get a special treat, and it won’t be another of the veep’s amusing dance routines as showcased the last time around. Convention organizers chose Ida McBeth, esteemed vocalist and multiple Klammy winner, to perform the national anthem in the high-profile…
Failure was one of those groups that really should have been more popular than it was. It had catchy songs, cool videos, and the endorsement of such elite alt-rock acts as Tool and the Deftones, yet it, well, failed to attract an audience and disbanded a few years ago. However, lead singer/songwriter Ken Andrews has returned with a new project…
Let it be noted that it is now possible for rock musicians to jump from an indie platform to full-blown fakery in one move, bypassing the sellout stage completely. So it is with Nina Gordon, formerly half of the minorly talented Veruca Salt. From the disco-lit cover of this solo debut to the mawkish title ballad, nothing about Tonight and…
On paper it is, at best, a dubious concept: a Latin dance combo covering repetitive German avant-garde pioneers Kraftwerk’s catalog. It would seem that the two types of music, both of which possess a somewhat limited appeal, would probably hold allure for almost no one when merged together. In execution, however, the unification works quite well, so score one for…
Rancid has been one of the only bands to show noticeable improvement from album to album, starting with the raw but monotonous Rancid in 1993, evolving to the more melodic Let’s Go and the stellar blend of streetpunk and Chuck Berry-style rock … And Out Come the Wolves, then culminating in the astounding Life Won’t Wait, one of the best…
Steely Dan might have ganked its name from William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, but one area duo has one-upped the literate soft-rockers. Brad Koehler and ReGina Cruse, known collectively as Cruse, have the proud distinction of actually coming to know each other through one of Lawrence’s most famous residents himself. Koehler, the band’s keyboardist and programmer, relates the events of…
Like a doo-wop satellite crashing to earth, the backing “sha-la-la-la-las” that ignite the coda of Chris Mills’ “Signal/Noise” start simply and burn through the song’s dramatic atmosphere. Fellow Chicago singer Kelly Hogan provides the female counterpoint on that song, which closes Kiss It Goodbye, Mills’ second full-length release. By the end of its seven-plus-minute run, the song takes on the…
The term “heavy metal” has been bandied about for the past quarter-century. Too often, various and sundry rock bands have been handed the title, once reserved for the truly heavy, when they simply don’t deserve it. In fact, very few rock and roll groups actually deserve this label. However, the London-based quintet Iron Maiden not only exemplifies the term…
