UPDATE: Ali the alligator has been sent to the Monkey Island animal sanctuary in Lee’s Summit. Meanwhile, Ali’s owner is fighting to get his gator back. Read the update after the jump … We apparently can’t go a month without an exotic pet story blowing up the local news. Over the weekend, Kansas City police found an alligator riding in…
If you can’t stand the heat, you’re probably a rational human being. The Naga Viper is now apparently the world’s hottest pepper — in the words of its creator, Gerald Fowler, “it’s hot enough to strip paint.” According to Yahoo, researchers at Warwick University have found that the Naga Viper measures 1,359,000 on the Scoville scale, which rates the heat…
The 96.5 Buzz concert series returns.
Missouri’s legislators promised real changes after an ugly couple years that saw FBI hearings on stalled bills, special interest groups blatantly buying votes, and editorials from both of Missouri’s major dailies calling for just a shred of ethics reform. And now they’ve appointed Missouri state Rep. Timothy Jones to be the brand new House Ethics Committee Chairman. Having accepted more…
Hometown custom guitar pedal company JHS Pedals supplies custom-made and vintage music gear to retail shops across the country. As of Friday, the company is entering the retail business itself, opening JHS Music, a brick-and-mortar store in Grandview. “We want to become Kansas City’s most unique guitar shop,” says founder Joshua Scott. Categories: Music Tags: jhs music, jhs pedals
Surely your list of fun things to do on Christmas Eve does not include having a pointy metal object shoved in your mouth and scraped against the surface of your teeth. But last year, more than 3,000 people showed up to Comfort Dental offices in five states to have a turn in the dentist’s chair on the day before Christmas….
Bark if you’ve heard this one before. Middle-aged man, vaguely dissatisfied with life, meets a gorgeous young lady — perky body; long, curly hair; affectionate and enamored; always ready for a romp but looking for commitment. They fall in love. Man takes her home, presents her to the wife and asks if his new sweetheart can join the household. It’s…
Janis Lyn Joplin entered “The 27 Club” — the storied list of musicians who died at age 27 — on October 4, 1970. Thirty-four years later, a year shy of her 27th birthday, Cleveland songstress Mary Bridget Davies continued Joplin’s legacy of soulful, awe-inspiring performances with Joplin’s original band: Big Brother and the Holding Company. “Mary Bridget has a lot…
Dear Mexican: Why can AeroMexico Airlines fly through any kind of weather conditions to get to and from the United States, but if there’s any kind of little ice sprinkle or heavy wind, domestic airlines in the United States cancel two days’ worth of flights? For two consecutive winters, I’ve had Chicago-to-Houston-to-León, Guanajuato on Continental Airlines and Chicago-to-Dallas-to-León on American…
Lasers. Fog machines. The crunch of Led Zeppelin. The prelude to a concert at the Sprint Center? Not quite. A tribute band at the casino? Not even close. No, the setting is a crowded ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Crown Center. I’m standing against a wall, taking in the thunder and lightning that is the Greater Kansas City Chamber of…
Kristen Stewart isn’t exactly playing a hooker with a heart of gold in Jake Scott’s underwritten Welcome to the Rileys, but she is playing a hooker, named Mallory. And the movie has something to do with her heart, but a lot more to do with her bad-girl vibe. Rileys follows middle-aged Doug Riley (James Gandolfini) from Indianapolis to the Crescent…
Discovered by East German archivists after World War II and accepted for decades as one of the few visual documents of life inside the Warsaw Ghetto, a 1942 Nazi propaganda film about the ghetto — in which rich Jews were portrayed living the high life while ignoring or exploiting the suffering of the poor Jews — was revealed as manipulative…
The usually silver-tongued Eliot Spitzer, political hero of last month’s Inside Job and now ubiquitous media personality, stammers and hesitates when asked to explain the psychosexual motivations behind his spectacular flameout in Alex Gibney’s gripping Client 9. Spitzer, whose tireless efforts to redeem himself led to his cooperation in this documentary, receives an entirely sympathetic — and thoroughly researched —…
This third adaptation from C.S. Lewis’ seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia comes underwritten by a new studio and with a new director, Michael Apted. The war has ground on, and Edmund and Lucy (Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley), the two youngest Pevensie children, are considerably grown up. They’re sequestered with an aunt in Cambridge, where they share a house with awful…
Singer-songwriters Kevin Welch and Monte Montgomery have been making records for two decades and living the troubadour life even longer. Welch’s flair lies in canny writing, with a song catalog that stretches back to the ’80s, when he spent his days in a Nashville publishing house writing for Don Williams, Patty Loveless and Reba McEntire. He released six solo albums,…
Ever wonder what would have happened if the Jesus and Mary Chain had sworn its allegiance to the Beatles rather than to the Beach Boys? Well, you don’t have to: Mini Mansions’ ’60s-inflected psych-pop answers that question. Though the Los Angeles trio doesn’t play music drenched in feedback, it shares a similar love of classic pop hooks, alluring vocal harmonies…
You’ve got to wonder whether Black Sabbath feels flattered or annoyed that its music has become a standardized vocabulary for an entire genre of imitators. At this point, comparing the Sword with Sabbath is about as meaningful as saying the Austin, Texas, quartet uses electric guitars. Still, among the band’s galloping, fuzzy peers, the Sword’s strong songwriting foundation stands alone….
Patrick Cuezze used to be a lawyer. Now he sells pizza. He couldn’t be happier. “You never hear any jokes about pizza makers, do you?” he says. “I liked being in the courtroom, but that part was overshadowed by everything else connected with the practice of law.” Last February, Cuezze and his wife, Joy, opened a storefront pizzeria in Lee’s…
Mudstomp Records is gathering an arsenal of up-and-coming pickers, stompers and hillbilly sound machines in Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri. Alongside Mountain Sprout, Lawrence’s Deadman Flats is one of the label’s flagship bands. Its shredded bluegrass sets the stage for a live DVD taping on Friday, December 10, at Liberty Hall. The Pitch caught up with Hank Osterhout, the band’s bassist…
On December 11, indie outfit the Noise FM headlines the second annual Noise for Toys benefit show at the Bottleneck. The charity concert, which is organized by members of the Noise FM with the support of the Douglas County Toys for Tots program, is also the band’s first hometown show since brothers Austin and Alex Ward made the move to…
China’s political structure defies easy characterization. Termed variously socialist, communist and authoritarian, its metastatic brand of party-controlled capitalism challenges the Western equation of liberty with unfettered markets. Consider also that the brothers Gao Qiang and Gao Zhen lost their father in 1968 to a political party that labeled him a dissident. The People’s Republic of China reported to the family…
Nathan D. Pryer used to be a civilian employee of the Edwardsville Police Department. Used to be because he was was arrested Saturday for allegedly sexually abusing two women on the same day, August 21, according to the Star. Pryer is reportedly charged with two counts of aggravated sexual battery. Not sure how some police employees confuse sexually abuse with…
Phil Bourne, the owner of the Waldo Pizza restaurants, tells Fat City that magician Eric Z. Price — the young man who was shot in the head last week in the restaurant’s parking lot — is still hospitalized, but out of intensive care and “recovering well.” “There’s no brain damage, at least none detected so far,” says Bourne. Bourne is…
