Even restaurant critics have bad days. Some nights I don’t want to go out to eat. Some nights I don’t mind going out to eat, but I don’t want company — I’m not always in a good mood, you know, and even my favorite people occasionally get on my last nerve. There are nights when I crave a simple grilled-cheese…
Norway and China may seem like peculiar bedfellows, but ceramic artist Joyce Jablonski combines her factory experiences in both countries to create imagery that transcends its hybrid origins. A ceramics professor at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, Jablonski has concentrated in the past on raw-looking work with a matte finish. In installations and multiples, her oeuvre has typically…
An admission, before I complain about how Quality Hill Playhouse’s Christmas in Song isn’t the season-saving treat this year that it has been for much of the decade. The admission: You know the thrush of warm feeling that tickles up and down your neck on those too-rare occasions when something truly moves you? At this year’s Christmas in Song, the…
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Way back in 1859, Kansas adopted a constitution that banned the sale of lottery tickets. Today, Kansans are far less squeamish about gambling. In September, state officials accepted a bid to put a Hard Rock Hotel & Casino next to the Kansas Speedway. If all goes according to schedule, blackjack — and Steven Tyler’s scarf-draped microphone stand — will descend…
As darkness descended on Black Friday and a few thousand obliging traditionalists gathered outside Crown Center to wait for the mayor to light his 100-foot Oregon fir tree, a cold breeze carried choral music and other sounds of the season. A tired-looking man in a jacket pocked with the Royals’ logo turned from his perch along a rail near the…
Dear Mexican: Why is it that those of us who oppose illegal immigration are called racist by many Mexicans? Personally, I think Hispanic people are a beautiful and diverse people who contribute tremendously to our culture (and spicy hot as well!). At the same time, I oppose illegals who wander across the border as if they just won the lottery,…
Town Without Pity: “Wolf’s Bane,” November 20 A Google Expert I’m writing in regard to wannabe hipster, pseudo-clever Town Without Pity writer Scott Wilson’s take on The Kansas City Star’s latest round of layoffs. Is this guy on crack or is he just a toolshed? Wilson wrote: “Anyone who calls President-elect Obama a socialist is a moron.” Wow. Since Scott…
Trace Adkins
Jagermeister Music Tour
Manchester-born, East-London raised writer Iain Ellis, an English professor at KU for the past eight years, has just published a book you might be interested in. Out this past December 1, Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists, is a study of the funny side of rock rebels such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, Warren Zevon,…
Anthony Spino, one of the owners of the venerable Anthony’s Restaurant at 701 Grand Avenue, and his family are delivering a Christmas tree to the ReStart Youth Shelter on Friday night. Earlier today he sent out this moving e-mail, requesting help. ReStart Youth Shelter is a shelter that helps out our homeless teens. They started with 3 beds a little over…
%{}% Two months ago, the members of the Kansas City Finance and Audit committee unanimously and enthusiastically approved a plan to issue bonds for the long-awaited Citadel Plaza shopping center at 63rd Street and Prospect Avenue. Today, those same members angrily denied the developer’s request for $20 million from city coffers and admonished everyone involved for incompetence. Now, a project 15 years in the…
Kansas City Crime starts the 2008 Kansas City dead pool. “Sorry no prize, just the lingering feeling that you live in one of the most violent places on earth,” writes Old Fat Cowboy. “Just the unsettling feeling that you or one of your loved ones may be the next victim of a stray bullet while riding a bus, a stabbing…
Earlier this morning, Good Morning America unveiled Kansas City’s holiday window at its Times Square studio. KC got the center window treatment because we represent “middle America, the heart of our country.” Missouri U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver pulled back the curtain, unveiling five giant Keepsake Ornaments (courtesy of Hallmark, which partnered with the Kansas City Convention & Visitors Association on…
Having just finished up a four-month culinary course, I thought I’d share some of the best kernels of knowledge I’ve acquired before I forget them myself. What follows is ten different concepts, tricks or just plain sense that culinary school has taught me so far: Number Ten: Mis en place. For chefs, this means having an organized kitchen after five…
For much of the 20th century, the 1926 building that we now recognize as the Raphael Hotel was an apartment building called the Villa Serena, and the lower-level space was a beauty parlor. When the building was turned into a boutique hotel, the Raphael, in 1975, the former salon was turned into an intimate restaurant called, simply, the Raphael Restaurant. That…
It’s odd that jet-lag needs a cure. It does not seem like the sort of thing for which there should be a cure. When it’s been a long time since you’ve traveled it can become easy to see jet lag as a psychological weakness, not a physical one. All you’ve got to do is tell yourself to “buck up, you’ve…
It’s been Burger King’s Modus operandi the past five years to make commercials that are — for lack of a better term — weird. While this plan started off with a bang and one of the first viral videos of the Web, lately it’s been leading to more and more forgettable commercials (and even a video game) featuring The King….
Darker My Love played Liberty Hall a couple of months ago in support of the Dandy Warhols. Since then, the L.A. act has taken up with the Strange Boys for another shot around the country. While they won’t be swinging through these parts anytime soon, they did give the folks at RCRD LBL the exclusive rights to post “Pharoah Sanders’…
%{}% Meteorological Fantasy Camp: When I was a little kid, I wasn’t always 100 percent sure what I was going to be when I grew up. But thanks to television, for most of the time that I was in single digits, I was pretty sure that my future career would involve carrying a gun. That’s the earliest instance of technology…
%{}% A certain local Russian blogger stops by Costco and upon taking a closer look at some of the listed ingredients there has a question: what the heck is chicken juice exactly and which part of the chicken does it come from? Speaking of chicken, the bird’s legs may be the anti-red-meat and actually help lower blood pressure. Don’t have…
