Daily Briefs: Chastains of Luv; Doris Lessing is Very Old
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By CHRIS PACKHAM
• Here’s a romantic Valentine’s Day idea: The busybody Chastains should start having “couple date night” — I’m talking about a special night that does not involve poring over the minutes of City Council meetings or talking about urban transit proposals but instead is spent really looking past their bizarre fixations and the scent of Vicks Vap-o-Rub and recalling what originally kindled their romance: the receipt, disbursement and application of public funds, and licking whipped cream off each other. It’s like the sensual comptrolling your parents enjoy around tax time each year. Ha ha, you’re thinking about your parents having sex.
• The owner of fantastically huge celebrity Uno the beagle is from Columbia, Missouri. The two will apparently be returning to Missouri following a few victory rawhide chew toys after winning the Westminster Dog Show. When I was 3 years old and I was considering my future career, I sincerely wanted to be a dog. This is exactly what I had in mind, vocation-wise.
• What we’ve had in Overland Park all this time was only the Sprint operational headquarters. Now, Sprint-Nextel is moving its corporate headquarters to JoCo. Y’know, Lenny, in Johnson County, if you want a pair of pleated Dockers khakis, you just reach up and pluck it! It’s the new Corporate Casual hub of the Heartland.
That reminds me — remember back in the ’90s, when the media were trying to change the name of the Midwest to the Heartland? No? Well, that’s because we won. Midwest 1, Katie Couric 0. But on this special, special day when we celebrate the Feast of Saint Valentine, the patron saint of sexxxy mix tapes and Chastain-on-Chastain speculative erotica, I think we do live in the “Heart”land.
• WHOOPS! Your grandma just sharted, right in the middle of the restaurant. Seriously, because how do you reach the age of 750 without learning that it isn’t necessary to articulate every stray fart of a thought that passes through your superannuated old relic of a forebrain? Embarrassing! Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing: Please spend your energy on the obvious conscious effort required to keep your heart beating and less time weighing in on American politics with your offensive race-based assassination fantasies. This story made me so angry that I had to spend several minutes gazing at this photo of Uno the beagle in order to calm myself down:
• Best Craigslist ad ever. If the Missouri Legislature would approve legal recognition of gay partnerships, I would totally take this classified advertisement as my new gay husband.
• Via this guy, the explosive combination of fundamental Christianity and women in positions of authority exploded in the least likely place — the state of Kansas! Way to prop up a national stereotype, Kansas Christians! Here’s another one: an Eskimo with a harpoon. St. Mary’s Academy near Topeka says that referee Michelle Campbell can’t officiate a boys’ high school basketball game: “Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs.” I was going to compose an angry, dismissive rant with antireligious overtones as a response, but instead, I gazed deeply into these beautiful brown eyes:
