Daily Briefs: Your new dress code

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• The new Power & Light District dress code began yesterday, and all patrons will now be be required to wear those little black shorts Henry Rollins used to wear when he fronted Black Flag. Button-down dress shirts must be TUCKED IN to little black Henry Rollins shorts. The only permissible hats are the race-neutral Darth Vader helmets which truly bring us together as one people, you guys, regardless of ethnicity, gender or unexplainable lack of fondness for famous records everyone says are really, really great because that’s what they’ve been told for a couple of generations. This is SERIOUS BUSINESS, and probably like the only thing standing between society and racism. I mean, besides a general societal consensus that racists are assholes, we’ve all agreed about that, right? I’m not sure about the URL for the part of my brain that just made all this up, so instead, here’s a link to KCTV channel 5 coverage of the actual dress code that contains only slightly more actual information than everything I’ve written here, and one fewer references to Henry Rollins.

• Kansas City Royals ball club boss-guy Trey Hillman didn’t let third bassist Alex Gordon into the baseball ring during yesterday’s sports tournament at The Kauffman Stadium of Sports, because the sporting-turf was too wet. And Hillman just couldn’t take the risk that a high, hard and inside foul ball or illegal contact by the opposing team’s defense would, uh, exacerbate Gordon’s sports injury? GO WILDCATS!!!! The team might have scored some touchdowns or something against the Cleveland Sports Players yesterday in the first of a several-game-series which the Home Team is expected to win decisively with victories in several events including the long jump, archery and field identification of songbirds. Fans were charged up with excitement by the hot dance stylings of the Kansas City Royals Cheerleaders. And who’s that I see on the Kiss Cam? Why, it’s love-birds Darla Jaye and Walt Bodine. ONE WAY, ALL THE WAY! TO STATE! Sorry, you guys, unlike my actual hypertrophic body muscles, my sports writing muscles are atrophied and flaccid from the disuse caused by my unfortunate indifference to sports. HOW DO YOU DO IT, Bob Dutton of the Kansas City Star? I’m going to stick to my core competency from now on: Reviews of stereo components on Pricegrabber.com.

•  The markets and pundits who talk about the markets were all heaving exaggerated, comical sighs of relief last week about the end of the new depression, because some reports from a few banks weren’t completely negative. Then there was a TOTALLY UNEXPECTED retail sales drop in March, so they’re all freaking out again. It’s like keeping a toddler up really late at night, for fun, just to watch all those conflicting emotions come bubbling explosively to the surface.

  As I read about all this in the Wall Street Journal, I had a startling epiphany. This immediately annoyed me, because I hate epiphanies in books and movies. Whenever I get to the part of the book in which the character says, “…and as I looked out the window, I realized that…,” followed by some sort of idiot, reductive little truism, my tendency is to hurl that book against something breakable. And epiphanies absolutely suck while you’re driving a car. Like the time I modified my theory about the so-called “George Foreman” grill. It used to seem completely obvious that one fine morning, George Foreman was watching his wife use a waffle iron and thought to himself, “Man, I could put a HAMBURGER in there.”

  But then one day while I was driving down Southwest Trafficway, I had a melodramatic epiphany, pulled my car off the road (which on Southwest Trafficway means I parked in somebody’s yard), and fumbled with my cellphone. In the kind of stunned voice people usually reserve for telling the babysitter that the CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE, I said to my girlfriend, “GEORGE FOREMAN IS A PAID SPOKESMAN! HE DID NOT INVENT THE GEORGE FOREMAN GRILL!”

  Instead of screaming and running out of the house in terror, she chose not to say anything. I halfheartedly shrieked a little bit, to prompt her. Finally, she said, “Are you on your way back from Sunfresh yet?” As she was saying that, the guy whose yard I’d parked in ripped the door open, dragged me out of the car by what would have been my lapels if I’d been wearing a jacket and in that voice that starts off really quiet and calm, but by the end of the sentence is violently screaming, demanded to know how I intended to pay for his rose bushes.

  Anyway, my epiphany was this: I’m going to go shopping at the new Dollar Store next to Half Price Books in Westport this weekend, because I am one poor motherfucker.