Register This!

The Strip was marveling recently at the kinds of things that show up in the Sunday edition of The Kansas City (Red) Star. The October 12 issue was simply chock full of remarkable goodies that taught us several things:

Chuck Gusewelle‘s cat is old.

Rhonda Chriss Lokeman thinks California Governor Gray Davis is an “icky poo.”

Editor Mark Zieman is so proud of his wife Rhonda Chriss Lokeman’s weekly brain fart that he ran not only her customary mug shot on the op-ed page but also a full-color portrait of her on the Metro section’s front page.

Readers’ Representative Yvette Walker was apparently so beset with complaints from readers that she felt compelled to pimp the Star‘s annoying new online registration system as “free, fast and painless.”

On October 2, Walker wrote, the Star‘s online cousin, kansascity.com, began requiring Net surfers to submit personal information before allowing them to read the paper’s stories. Want to keep up on a breaking development at City Hall or retrieve Joe Posnanski‘s musings about last week’s Chiefs game? First, you’ll have to submit your name, address, gender, year of birth, e-mail address and a password.

A few days after registration began, the Strip bumped into the site’s firewall for the first time and had the same reaction that many others did: Give up private info to read a Mike Hendricks yawnfest or a Lewis DoGooder sermon? Shya right!

But there are good reasons to call up the Star‘s Web site. For the most part, it’s just a warmed-over version of what shows up on the ol’ doorstep every morning. But the Strip has found it useful some afternoons to keep an eye on the site’s occasional breaking Associated Press stories before the morons at local TV have a chance to mangle them in the evening. But listen, hands down the No. 1 reason to access the Star electronically is to call up old Rhonda Chriss Lokeman editorials for their pure entertainment value.

Check out this September 21 nugget from her weekly spasm of unintentional hilarity (for best results, we recommend an out-loud dramatic reading): A gentle September breeze blows the buddleia. The purple and yellow combs of the butterfly bushes bounce as the Monarchs shift themselves to remain attached. Once dislodged, they fly immediately back to a flower to unfurl their slender black tasters until the next gust sets them off again. As they have each year, the Monarchs make themselves at home in this Kansas City homeowner’s butterfly garden, a stage of sorts for their aerial ballet. They share space inhabited earlier in the season by tiny white Cabbages, yellow Sulfurs and magnificent blue-black Swallowtails….

Fun stuff. But the thought of having to cough up address and birth-date info to retrieve that kind of nepotistic tripe irked the Strip something fierce.

Still, it was Yvette Walker’s October 12 sales job that really seared this meat patty.

Walker is new at her job, so perhaps it hasn’t sunk in yet that as “readers’ representative” she’s supposed to challenge her colleagues over their practices and shortcomings, not act like a tool of the Star‘s marketing department. Walker described how she, too, found the registration process a bit bothersome at first, but assured readers that their information would be kept private and excused the intrusion as something that is “more and more common.”

Prominently missing from the column were two questions that a true “readers’ representative” would be quick to ask: Why is the Star suddenly asking for this information, and what’s the paper going to do with it? The Strip tried to ask Walker these two questions directly, but she didn’t return our phone call. She was too busy dealing with complaints about the comics page and TV listings, apparently.

As the sirloin of local media, however, this fillet felt an obligation to resist the Star‘s ham-fisted intrusion. We already spend too much of our day fending off e-mail offers from genital expanders and Nigerian grifters to hand yet another Web site everything an identity thief would need to make the Strip’s life a living hell.

But then inspiration struck. If we were forced to fill out an infernal registration form, perhaps we could perform a public service. So here’s precisely what we entered:

E-mail address: strip@pitch.com

Password: hamloaf

First name: The

Last Name: Pitch

Address: 1701 Main, Kansas City, Missouri 64108

Gender: (not tellin’)

Year of birth: 1980

Yep, the Pitch has been around 23 years, givin’ the smarter folks in this town the inside dope they can really use, such as an e-mail address and password they can enter to bypass the marketing wankers at the Star.

That’s right. Feel free. When the Star‘s online gatekeeper asks for your e-mail address and password, type in the handle of this ever-lovin’ slab of protein.

And if you’ve already sent in your private info — kicking and screaming, no doubt — you can just log out (look for the words log out in red in the upper-left of the screen) and check back in as yours truly.

Then you can anonymously surf to your heart’s content, even if surfin’ on kansascity.com is a little like trying to catch shore break on the Big Muddy.