A little after midnight, a Kansas City police officer exchanged gunfire with a man. Kansas City police say the officer attempted a “pedestrian check” on a man walking near 41st and Tracy. View Larger Map Didn’t work. The man bolted. The officer chased him, and the man fell. The man allegedly pulled out a handgun from his waistband and fired…
Update (4:35 p.m. Monday, September 28): Kansas City police say the victim is 24-year-old Brian K. Smith. Update (11:18 a.m. Monday, September 28): Kansas City police are investigating the man’s death as a homicide. No suspects are in custody. The body of a white male was found near 49th and Eastern Monday around 4:10 a.m. View Larger Map The man,…
His name may still be new to Kansas Citians, but in St. Louis, our colleagues at the Riverfront Times have been reporting on the saga of Darryl Burton, the subject of last week’s feature story, since 2004. Click here to read Malcolm Gay’s story, “A Shot in the Arm,” published in November 2004. Click here to read Gay’s follow-up on…
As cows and horses paraded to the American Royal downtown Saturday morning, a group of animal rights advocates marched through Country Club Plaza, intent on ensuring more farm critters live out their natural days in bucolic peace, rather than biding their time before the slaughterhouse. The annual walk, one of dozens across the country held each fall, raises funds for…
Austrailian Pink Floyd
The girliest restaurant in the metro, Madame Hatters Tea Room Last December, I stumbled upon a little tea room in downtown Eudora, Kansas — yes, there is one — called Madame Hatters Tea Room and I stopped in for lunch; the food was good enough that I actually reviewed it as part of a bigger story on local tea shops….
There are bee hives and bee hives… There are beehives, like the traditional home for a swarm of buzzing honeymakers, like the photo above, and then there is the beehive hairdo, which was considered high fashion in the big hair days of the 1960s. Don’t believe me? Check out Miss Dusty Springfield, Queen of Vietnam-era Pop and sumptuously teased-out tresses!…
Heavy times abound, but we can all learn something from My Weekly Reader. Our Crap Archivist dug up copies from 1936 for this week’s edition of Studies in Crap (live every Thursday morning on the Plog!), and inside are lessons on race that one Missouri state rep may want to ponder. The illustration and caption on the right were the…
Sometimes guys convicted of murder are innocent. That’s the case of Darryl Burton, who Nadia Pflaum profiled in “Miracle Man,” this week’s Pitch feature story. Burton was falsely imprisoned for 24 years — until last year. Now, Burton has found peace thanks to Jesus. Also, the Dr. Crap rips apart Berdella: The Movie. Ferruzza reviews Maxwell’s Downtown Grill in Lee’s…
Angie, Victoria, Laura and Thalia were regular performers on Saturday nights at Bar Azul (4960 State Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas), our winner for Best Drag Shows. Photographer Michael McClure caught their beauty ritual at a tiny salon in Kansas City, Kansas. These four ladies are now performing on Saturdays at Daddy’s (1610 Main, Kansas City, Missouri), while Azul’s drag…
And once again, we bring you Friday Freebies, wherein we present things to do this weekend that won’t cost you any more than the gas it takes to get to ’em. All weekend long is the Lee’s Summit Oktoberfest, with all the usual carnival accoutrements, such as rides, craft booths, and the like, as well as live entertainment on three…
As fiction writers tend to, author Amy MacKinnon spins a fair amount of true-ish things into her literary creation. Example: A major character in Tethered, her debut novel, is an elderly undertaker, who with his wife, inhabits a lovely, welcoming home above his funeral parlor. In real life, that’s how MacKinnon’s aunt and uncle lived. A less personal element of…
Daft Punk is the perfect band to do the theme for a movie about being stuck in a computer world. With songs like “Robot Rock,” they’ve pretty much soundtracked a sci-fi movie at this point. Doing the music for Tron Legacy (a much better title than the original Tr2n) just makes it official. It doesn’t come out until next year,…
You need plans. Fat City has a recycle bin full of event listings. In this post, all of our problems are solved. While it’s not quite a dry run, particularly because they’re promising a biergarten, Oktoberfest kicks off in Lee’s Summit today. With an entire tent for bratwursts and two stages of entertainment, the festival spans three days — Friday…
Authorities say former Blue Springs man Todd Barkau did some sick, sick things to a 12-year-old girl. The 37-year-old allegedly raped the 12-year-old, trained her to be a dominatrix and prostituted her between January 2002 and February 2005. That would be shocking enough, but then there’s the 12-year-old girl’s mother, who allowed Barkau to teach her daughter to be a…
Let’s start with the hard parts. You’re either going to love Calvados or you’re going to hate it. And a decent bottle is going to cost you more than $20 and likely closer to $40 — all for something that may end up gathering dust in the back of your liquor cabinet. That said, there’s a strong case to be…
Benjamin Tobias Ruth isn’t quite old enough to be considered a grandfather of the scene yet, but he has enough stories to put you on his lap and spin a yarn or two. I caught up with the 31-year-old bassman of the Grand Marquis and Be/Non at the Brooksider (located in the same neighborhood where he grew up and still…
Last week, the Crap Archivist discovered Weird Stuff Antiques at 901 Tracy Ave. downtown. Weird Stuff’s manager Rob Hutson and owner Terry Sanchez were cool enough to let us look around — and snap some pics. Here’s the treasures — many of them oversized — that we found.
