Daily Briefs: Funkhouser’s Budget; Wal-Mart; Someday, Overland Park Will Come For You
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By CHRIS PACKHAM
• You know what? It’s a good thing that Mayor Mark Funkhouser has engendered so much goodwill and has an awesome relationship with the City Council, because he says Kansas City needs to cut $70 million from the budget.
• If it weren’t for illegal Internet scrip doctors, I’d probably be paying $500 a month out-of-pocket for my Mirapex tabs. It’s actually an extra-large pramipexole dihydrochloride variant made for horses, but believe me, my restless-leg syndrome is fucking out of control, like the cinematography in Baz Luhrman movies. And if you think the unusual adverse side effects of compulsive gambling, hypersexuality and overeating are bad with human-sized doses, believe me, they’re worse with the 1,200-milligram tabs.
Can’t we all just agree as a society that distributing pharmaceuticals outside the closed loop of doctors’ prescriptions and licensed pharmacies is a victimless crime, like bear baiting? Nonetheless, jackbooted prosecutors have indicted a Belton pharmacy owner for allegedly illegally attempting to distribute prescription drugs.
• Retail marketing solutions company Kendal King Group Inc. is moving to the Crossroads Arts District! Because of all the creativity! Which you need in order to produce Wal-Mart commercials.
• Speaking of which, if there’s one corporate discount department store chain where you’re most likely to get dog-piled and beaten by tobacco-chewing fans of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, it’s pretty much going to be Wal-Mart.
• Overland Park wants to annex Stillwell as a substrate for its continued metastasis, by which I’m totally not trying to imply that the Kansas suburb is a giant tumor. According to some Stillwell residents, Overland Park will have to pry their town from under their cold, dead feet. OP is promising all kinds of tax exemptions to Stillwell residents, but they just want to continue raising horses and parking campers in their driveways. A man should be the king of his driveway, the thinking goes in Stillwell.
• Role-playing games and the novels of Piers Anthony are often set in other worlds in which magic and science “coexist in an uneasy balance.” Because Piers Anthony’s pervy books are also populated with underage girls, and because the panties worn by those underage girls tend to vanish — via magic or science-based means — the books are considered to be authoritative examinations of the lives of particle physicists who are also centaurs.
As a real-world example of the “uneasy balance” of science and irrational faith-based sorcery, the State Science and Technology Institute, a national organization “dedicated to improving the economy through science and technology,” has selected the least likely place in the country — Kansas — for its 13th-annual conference in 2009. As measured by the degree of belief in irrational faith-based sorcery, the state of Kansas is second only to Xanth, a magical land populated by dragons, goblins and naked 16-year-old girls. Will the scientific empiricism of SSTI members still work at the Sheraton in Overland Park, where fundamental laws of physics and biology break down?
